


the ficpocalypse

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Ficlet Collection, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 01:17:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 70
Words: 31,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17012799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: A series of ficlets I wrote for an event simply entitled "the ficpocalypse." These are all quite old - written in 2013/2014-ish. Those that have not been posted here already are being preserved before tumblr dies for good.





	1. fight me; alex and tim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Fight Me with Jay and Tim, Jay and Alex, or Tim and Alex (alternatively, Zip Me, hurrhurr)**
> 
> the response: **Fight Me, with Tim and Alex (and a surprise guest)**

Tim hurts, aches. The empty hospital was hard enough to navigate even before a very unexpected, very pissed off Alex charged him right the fuck out of nowhere and began wailing on him.

One of Tim’s eyes is swollen shut and he’s covered with bruises and cuts and scrapes and he’s pretty sure Alex is grabbing for the nearest sharp rock to finish him off.

He’s gotten up only to be beaten down one to many times. Tim can only muster the effort to roll onto his back so he can stare his enemy in his cold, furious face one last time before the inevitable end. His jaw aches from when Alex’s fist had cracked across it, but he clenches it anyway.

Alex half-prowls, half-limps toward his grounded foe, rock in hand. It’s too dark to see Alex’s face, but Tim savagely hopes it’s just as bloodied as his feels.

His reserves of adrenaline and fear have been exhausted. Tim doesn’t care about fighting anymore; he just wants it _over._ No more scared nights or seizures or coughing. No more doctors’ appointments or pills or fucking _tapes_ or mysteries. No more waking up in a car with a slow sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach when he realizes that he doesn’t remember what he did last night.

Tim’s okay with it. More than okay with it, actually; he really kind of wants it all over and done with. Tim is first to admit that he was dealt a shitty hand from day one. It’s time to fold.

The tingling in the back of his mind has a different idea.

 _No,_ Tim tells himself firmly. _Back down. It’s over._ We’re _over._

The disquiet in his head, the static tearing at his conscious state, persists. It disagrees.

Alex grows closer. He grips the rock in both hands and raises it above his hand, a gesture of awful finality.

Tim closes his eyes and waits and right out of nowhere, he remembers Jay.

_He’ll really be alone now._

and the thought makes Tim falter, and for just a second he _slips -_

 _-he can’t take us both at once_ -

And Tim’s eyes are still shut but his other half’s eyes fly open.

_-let’s play-_

He can feel it like he’s underwater, his body rolling away to dodge Alex’s striking blow. It’s the strangest feeling, Tim watching himself through his own eyes.

He’s never been able to remember before.

And _not-Tim_ is moving with a feral, inhuman grace, rolling onto its feet and leaping toward Alex in one fluid movement. Tim is too dazed, too distanced to be properly afraid. He barely even registers when his other half knocks Alex to the ground and seizes the rock in both hands. Tim and Alex’s positions have reversed; Alex is flat on his back with Tim holding the rock poised above his head.

Tim snaps back into his own body, but the other him is still there, present in the weight of the rock in his hands. Tim looks down numbly at Alex, who glares back with an expression of utter hatred.

_-end him-_

Tim isn’t really sure what happened, but he knows he doesn’t want to do that. He tries to put the rock down, but his hands don’t obey.

_-he would have ended us-_

Tim’s hands shake. He was ready to fold. He was ready for it to be done, no more hard decisions. He doesn’t want to keep playing.

_-do it-_

Tim doesn’t want to. Alex’s face is twisted into a grotesque tapestry of pain and fury. His eyes, defiant to the end, dare Tim to follow through.

_-he’ll hurt us again-  
_

Tim shakes his head, breath catching in his throat. He’s started to shiver. But then-

_-he’ll hurt jay again-_

And Tim brings the rock down.


	2. wed me; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **wed me,... Tim and Jay from mh. ik it's not realistic but please give me the thing anyway, my heart-place hurts ;n;**
> 
> the response: **I’ve never written Jam fic or wedding-related fic so this is a first for me on a lot of levels. Oh boy, here goes...**

“This is the last time I’m letting you get dinner,” Tim complains as he rifles through the plastic bags Jay just dumped on his hotel bed.

“What?” Jay looks mildly wounded at the disparaging tone in Tim’s voice. “You don’t like my taste?”

“I was hoping for something a little more substantial than cracker jacks and…whatever the hell this is.” Tim dangles a package of ‘Perky Jerky’ between forefinger and thumb, grimacing at it as if it has personally offended him in some way.

“It’s beef jerky, Tim.”

“I know what beef jerky looks like. _This,”_ Tim tosses the rejected food back into the bag. “isn’t it.” He pops open the bag of cracker jacks and halfheartedly grabs a handful. “I didn’t even know they made these things anymore.”

"I was feeling nostalgic, all right?” Jay shrugs defensively. He fishes around in his own bag of cracker jacks for another handful. “Haven’t had these things since I was a - _oh.”_ Instead of cracker jacks, he finds the hidden toy surprise. He swallows hard as he stares at it nervously.

"What’s up?” Tim looks up, only to see the tiny plastic ring Jay is eying like it’s about to pounce on him. Tim almost chokes on his dinner. “Is that a _wedding ring?”_

 _"Plastic_ wedding ring.” The over-exaggerated stress Jay puts on the word ‘plastic’ is quickly ruined when Tim notices that his ears have turned bright red.

"Who’s the lucky bride?” Tim deadpans.

“Shut up.” Jay flicks the ring at Tim’s face. It bounces off his nose.

“That’s not how proposals typically work.” Tim can’t bring himself to let this one go, not now that Jay has begun to look visibly flustered. “Traditionally, the proposer goes down on one knee and presents said ring to the proposee. Still, can’t fault you for lack of trying.”

“You’re a dick,” Jay mumbles, rubbing his nose furiously with one hand.

“Hey, once this is over, we can do whatever we want.” Tim abandons his insubstantial meal for a moment to rummage through the plastic bags for a water. “Shoddy proposals and bad beef jerky notwithstanding.”

“It wasn’t a _proposal,”_ Jay persists. His ears are positively glowing.

Tim snorts. “Sure, Casanova. Whatever you, uh…” In shaking empty his bag of cracker jacks, he’s located his own toy surprise.

"What?” Jay looks up when Tim doesn’t finish his sentence. Then he actually cracks a grin when he sees that, as fate would have it, Tim has also gotten a plastic wedding ring.

“What’re you gonna do with that?” Jay teases.

“Shut it,” Tim grumbles good-naturedly. “And next time let me do the grocery shopping. I think I can hear my esophagus decomposing.”

“Maybe that’s just the sound of your burning terror of commitment.”

“Jay?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t know why cracker jacks were the first thing to spring to mind, but there you go. And yes, I can personally attest that ‘Perky Jerky’ is a legitimate (and awful) brand of beef jerky. I hope this is okay, nonny!


	3. comfort me; team totheark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Comfort me Masky and Hoody please!**
> 
> the response: **This one was quite a challenge since I wanted to write Masky’s POV from a sort-of alien but still recognizable perspective. Set almost immediately after Entry #35.**

There’s _pain-hurt_ humming through them, through the body of the boy they’re borrowing, but it’s of no consequence. It will pass.

There are footsteps fading, the sounds of motor engine things rumbling away. Their attackers have fled.

They try to force the body to stand, but it does not obey. One of its legs is shaking, covered in blood and hurt. They get frustrated quickly. It is just a body. It should not matter. Yet here it refuses to respond.

The shuffling of feet, of not-running-fleeing-angry feet, stirs them to try and stand again, but to no avail. Their leg is useless.

Relief courses through them when they see the red-and-black stitched face and brown pointed hood of Friend.

_Help?_

Friend reaches down and helps their broken body stand. They ignore the bursts of _hurt feeling_ that accompany the action.

_Help._

Friend steadies them, lets them lean on Friend’s shoulder. With Friend’s help, they can limp-walk out of the shattered building where they were supposed to _get rid of the angry man._

Their shoulders sag even as their back remains taut and shivering with the effort of staying upright. They failed.

Friend does not seem to care. Friend is good to them, even if they don’t really belong in this battered body.

Friend waits until they are leaning steadily against the outside wall of the building before going back in. When Friend returns, they can see their Face in its hand. Not-angry-man had torn it from them in the hurt-struggle, exposing the true face of the body they wore.

Friend hands them their Face and they take it gratefully. If they knew how to smile they would.

They feel like Friend feels the same way maybe.


	4. meet me; craig digsby and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Meet me Craig Digsby and Jay. Please. I think we all need this so much.**
> 
> the response: **fucking hell this is the stupidest thing i’ve ever written**

The exterior of 79 South Creek Road was silent. No sign of Tim, nor Alex, nor even the person in the hoodie. Jay wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been this. The eerie quiet of the place unnerved him.

He took a few cautious steps toward the door, pausing only to hit the red ‘RECORD’ button on the camera. His wrists still ached, chafed from their time spent ziptied together. The memory of Tim tying him up and just _leaving_ him there stung worse.

Jay shook his scowl. He wasn’t here for Tim. He was here for answers.

…answers that would be a lot easier to find if the door wasn’t fucking _locked._

Frustrated, Jay began prowling the wide perimeter of the building. There was plenty of woodland surrounding it, but he stuck close to the building walls. He had had too much trouble with forested areas in the past to dare wandering away from the slightly more secure walls of the building.

He circled the entire building and still, nothing. He would need to break a window. Jay squared his shoulders and started searching for a rock.

He quickly located a rather hefty one, perfect for his needs. Unfortunately, it was much heavier than it looked. Jay strained to lift it from the ground, growing ever more exasperated. He didn’t have time for this.

Panting and tired and having still not made any significant leeway with the rock (he heavily suspected it was more of a boulder at this point), Jay set down his camera and sat with his back against the obstinate stone while he caught his breath.

It took him a few minutes to register that there was a faint… _whispering?_ Coming…from the…rock?

Jay tilted his head. It sounded too rhythmic to be whispering. _So what in the…_

“Did you know that rocks have their own secret language?”

The unexpected voice caused Jay to nearly fall from his seat. He scrambled for his camera but froze in shock when he saw the owner of the voice.

“If you listen closely you can _JUUUUUUUUST_ hear it.”

Jay could only drop the camera and stare in mute horror.


	5. time travel me; alex, tim, and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Timetravel me Alex Tim and Jay. With the Grapefruit. This request thing is turning into crack, huh?**
> 
> the response: **this is just getting ridiculous.**

Jay was aching all over. It felt an awful lot like his brain had just been superheated in a microwave on ‘high’ for several hours. There were distant sounds of…roaring? Some animal call? He groaned and, legs wobbling precariously due to the uncomfortable sensation that they had turned into jelly, tried to stand. He had to put his hand on the nearest palm tree to steady himself.

_…palm tree?_

It took Jay about ten seconds to register that no, it wasn’t a palm tree - it was some kind of tree that looked like a palm tree but happened to be 

_five times as fucking gigantic._

It took Jay a full minute to realize that the animal calls were coming from fucking dinosaurs.

_Fucking dinosaurs?_

Twin groans shook Jay from his shocked staring. He wasn’t alone here, in the apparently fucking prehistoric era. Tim and Alex had ended up here with him. Along with, for some reason, a solitary grapefruit. 

Jay racked his brains. Why was there a grapefruit?

“What the hell?” Tim grumbled, viciously rubbing the back of his head. “What happened? Where are we?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Alex retorted frostily. Tim glowered at him, shoulders tensing, and Jay knew he should intervene quick before someone ended up with a black eye.

“Hold on.” Jay swiftly moved between the two of them. “We don’t know where we are or how we got here. Fighting amongst ourselves probably isn’t the best course of action.”

“Jay!” Tim looked furious. “Have you forgotten that he’s been trying to kill us for the past year?”

“No, but have you noticed that we’re surrounded by fucking dinosaurs?” 

“We’re _what?”_

Jay folded his arms sternly while Tim and Alex took in their surroundings. He compulsively checked to see if the camera was recording, but soon recognized there was no need. The battery was dead.

And then there was the matter of the grapefruit. Jay didn’t know why its presence irked him, but it did. He never liked grapefruits. He scooped it up and studied it.

"Holy shit,” Tim said slowly, still in a state of disbelief. “We’re surrounded by fucking dinosaurs.”

“And a grapefruit,” Jay mumbled half to himself, puzzled.

Alex, on the other hand, didn’t look confused or surprised. He just crossed his arms and glared angrily at the dinosaurs as if they had personally wronged him.

“This is such bullshit.”


	6. meet me; creepypasta still kinda sucks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Misky and Hoddy (Creepypasta versions of our favorite stalkers) meet Masky and Hoody.**
> 
> the response: **are you fugkcing**

Misky was in a good mood. He had disemboweled 5 whole victims today with the help of his good friend Hoddy. They were content to wander around until plot contrivances called them to go out and do other things.

So there they were, creepypastaing about in the Creepypasta Forest, when Hoddy had an idea.

What if, Hoddy proposed slyly, they chose to stray from their own domain and wander into the other nearby realms of Contemporary Internet Horror? Misky blushed wildly at the prospect, never once questioning how it was possible for an inanimate white mask to blush.

They picked a direction at random and capered off. They weren’t sure what they would find, but surely it would be more interesting than the average “stalk and kill, rinse and repeat” routine they had going on.

It didn’t take Misky and Hoddy long to stumble upon two other wandering souls, ones that looked…remarkably the same as they did.

One of them looked an awful lot like Misky, with a white mask and a tan jacket instead of a yellow one. Their eyes weren’t visible beneath their mask, not like Misky’s bright sapphire sea sky limpid blue ones.

Hoddy examined his doppelganger with equal interest. Their hoodie was more of a brownish-beige as opposed to Hoddy’s yellow one, and they looked considerably more disheveled. In fact, both of them did.

Misky waved hello. His mirror only tilted its head to one side, almost curiously.

“ZOMG,” said Misky.

It wasn’t long before Misky and Hoddy’s strange, silent twins were back on their merry way, leaving a bloodied rock, a bent lead pipe, and two thoroughly unrecognizably beaten bodies behind them.


	7. so very empty; alex kralie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **alex hating himself and what he's become in a moment of sanity**
> 
> the response: **This is the single serious prompt I got and I loved every minute of writing it.**

his name is alex kralie

his name is alex kralie and once upon a time he had a dog and a girlfriend and classes he loved and he used to work on a stupid student film for a stupid class project millions of years ago

and _none of this is his fault_

he tells himself over and over

hoping

it

will

sink

in

it doesn’t.

nothing does.

it’s a stupid lie he tells himself, that it isn’t his fault, that he couldn’t have done anything to stop it, that this is just the way things _are,_ and Jay shouldn’t have been a stupid enough shit to go digging through those old tapes.

all lies.

he knows whose fault it is. it all comes down to one alex kralie.

and now

he’s

empty

empty and obedient, like a broken toy soldier.

he does what he’s told and he doesn’t question, not anymore. he used to but it _hurt_ when he did. he used to resist, he used to question, he used to _fight_

alex is not a fighter

not anymore.

now he is a soldier

and he wishes _it_ would come and take away his pain, steal his mind into its pocket and fill him with the blessed relief of mindless fear

because it is only then, when it makes him _do things,_ that he can bury himself in his movements and his actions and he can forget what he is and what he’s doing and _why_

because even if it all comes rushing back later, at least he can forget for one minute, maybe two, maybe even ten, and he can be the good little soldier

soldiers don’t need to think

soldiers don’t need to feel

alex doesn’t need to feel

but he still does. because even underneath the tangles of _thoughtpainfeelhurt_ that keep his mind ensnared, bound to this _thing,_ alex is still so very human

so very human

so very weak

and so very empty.


	8. wed me; alex and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **wed me jay and alex operator as priest**
> 
> the response: **shitting nickels fine okay here we go**

“I, Alex Kralie, do take this guy, Jay whatshisname-”

 _“Jay whatshisname?_ You don’t remember my last name? You’re _fucking marrying me.”_

“Well, no offense, but this is _you_ we’re talking about, Jay. For the first two years I knew you I thought that ‘J’ was just the first letter of your real name.”

"You’re serious?”

“I think I’m contractually obliged to be serious on our wedding day.”

“And you never thought to, you know, _ask_ me?”

"It kind of got to the point where it would just be too awkward to straight-up ask, you know?”

“So you waited until _our wedding_ to find out what it was?”

"Nah. I didn’t bother. I just figured it would be something weird or unpronounceable, like Gilgamesh or something.”

_“Gilgamesh?”_

“I don’t know!”

“You’re a dick, you know that?”

“You still love me?”

“Let me think that one over after I punch you in the face.”

 _“Mmmmmmmmmf,”_ the Operator said angrily.

It didn’t have a mouth.


	9. haunt me; alex kralie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **hAUNT ME WITH ALEX DEAD AND SANE AND NORMAL AGAIN WATCHING OVER JAY AS HE STRUGGLES TO SURVIVE PLEASE**
> 
> the response: **Goody, another serious prompt! This one is much more somber in tone compared to the last few, to say in the least.**

It feels strange to be like this, walking and present and self-aware but without a body to ground him. It only took Alex a few days to get used to the peculiar sensation, and to realize that he was, in fact, dead.

He still can’t remember what finally did him in. It doesn’t really matter, nor does it surprise him that he has not been allowed to…move on. Whatever that means. He’s done too many terrible things to do anything but linger.

Because if there’s one thing Alex Kralie does best, it’s regret.

He walk-drifts about Rosswood Park for a few days, but quickly gets bored of it. He wonders how Jay is. Free as Alex is from the dreaded _thing_ that held him for so many years, he harbors only the barest of ill wills toward his old friend. Jay was doing what he thought was right, the dolt. Even if that meant blundering into the most obvious of traps with a camera in one hand and a dinky little knife in the other.

It takes Alex almost half a day to track his old friend - though the term “friend” might be a little generous at this point - because even though he doesn’t need to eat or sleep or really do anything anymore, there’s an awful lot of ground to cover.

He finds Jay at Tim’s house, in a most unusual fashion. Jay struggles, hands and legs ziptied together. It would be amusing if the look on Jay’s face didn’t remind Alex horribly, painfully, of what he himself had endured at the hands of his tall, faceless master.

He knows what Jay is experiencing right now, the walls of his mind being steadily chipped away, the constant thrumming of headaches pounding to escape the fringes of his sanity. Jay’s cracked psyche has taken so much abuse in the past four years already, but now that Alex is gone, there’s no doubt what his eventual fate will be. Jay will be _thatthing’s_ new _pet_ , to be broken and driven out of his mind and made to do terrible things.

Alex reaches one pale hand to his friend but soon remembers he can’t help him. Alex is dead. Jay can’t see him. He doesn’t even know he’s here.

Alex has spent the last seven years of his life helpless, and now he’s doomed to suffer this way forever. If only there was _something…_

Tim’s kitchen is right beside the living room. Alex moves hesitantly toward the drawers. The drawer of silverware doubtless has knives in it, steak knives if Jay is lucky.

Alex narrows his transparent gaze and shakes away his resentment and self-loathing for just a minute and _focuses._

And the drawer tips, and the silverware, knives and all, goes spilling to the floor.

The sound makes Jay start. Slowly, painfully, he flops over to the disturbance. His face breaks into a tired smile when he sees the knives.

The relief on Jay’s face hurts. Alex knows what hell is in store for him. And tipping over a drawer of knives won’t do a thing to prevent it.


	10. marble butts; alex kralie

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **ALEX REWATCHING THE MH VIDEOS AND STARING AT HIS OWN BUTT AND CRYING BECAUSE THE KRALIE BUTT IS SO FABULOUS**
> 
> the response: **i hope i never have to write the word ‘butt’ as much as i did in this unholy piece of writing mother of hell**

Alex knew this had been a bad idea.

He had just wanted to re-watch some of the old entries to look for clues and possibly predict what Jay’s next move would be. As he got further along, he grew more and more astounded at how much butt was in them.

Jay seemed to have a strange obsession with filming butts. Mostly Alex’s butt, it seemed. When he wasn’t pointing the camera at his own feet, he was pointing it at the butt of whomever he was following. Which, in this case, happened to be Alex. A lot.

Alex didn’t know why this distracted him as much as it did, but there you go. He simply could not believe the amount of butt in these videos. He could not believe that he had never noticed the amount of butt in these videos.

He was entranced. He actually felt tears well up inside his eyes. Things were so much simpler in the past entries, butts notwithstanding. Alex lamented how complicated things had gotten, so much more complicated than filming butts.

_(The butts were nice too.)_

Alex was so taken up by the majestic sight of his own butt that he completely forgot why he was watching the entries in the first place. Even once he’d watched every entry with his butt in it five times through, he still couldn’t remember why he’d decided to watch them at all. His own butt had made him forget.

In Alex’s defense, it was a very nice butt.


	11. kitten me; alex, jay, and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **kitten me with alex and jay and tim wandering the streets as kittens.**
> 
> the response: **what was going through your head when you asked this anon**

Jay was upset, and he let Alex and Tim know he was upset, repeatedly, with the most high-pitched mews he could muster. They did their best to ignore him, too concerned with passive-aggressively avoiding eye contact and looking for a place to sleep tonight.

Jay realized he wasn’t being listened to. So the gray-and-white striped kitten sat down square in the middle of the street, wrapping his tail stubbornly around his paws.

Tim and Alex soon noticed he wasn’t following them anymore, much to their annoyance. Alex stalked up to Jay and tried to nudge him to keep moving.

The tip of Tim’s tail twitched impatiently. He was cold and tired and just wanted to find a nice hotel parking lot to sleep in for the night. The black kitten was grateful there were no incoming cars, or Jay would be toast. He could be stubborn at times.

By “at times,” Tim meant “in the most inconvenient times possible.” He scowled as best as a kitten can and prodded at Jay impatiently with a paw. Jay was obstinate.

Alex and Tim paced back and forth, growing ever more frustrated with the third member of their party’s complete lack of cooperation. Finally, they exchanged a glance and just gave up. They resumed their search for a place to stay. Jay continued to sit in the middle of the street, but his ears drooped when he realized his friends weren’t going to listen to him. He reluctantly scampered to catch up with them.

They managed to find a rather nice alleyway where they could curl up for the night. Alex’s brown tabby fur blended in perfectly as he lay down in a secluded corner of the alley, so only his yellow eyes were visible. Soon those, too, disappeared as he closed his eyes and, exhausted, dropped off to sleep.

Tim turned to the still-petulant Jay. He tilted his head inquisitively, wondering why Jay had been so determined to get his and Alex’s attention.

The gray kitten hung his head. He was too embarrassed to admit that he was missing his camera.

“You don’t have a camera, Jay,” meowed Tim, breaking the rules of logic and the universe out of sheer exasperation. “You’re a fucking cat.”


	12. found; jay and jessica

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Serious writing prompt! Jay finally finds Jessica but switch places with her so she can have a normal life with no memory of the events that happen to her.**

It took him two years.

It took him two years, countless betrayals, sleepless nights, hopeless nights, nights where he wondered what the damn _point_ of it all was, but he finally found her.

And she doesn’t even recognize him.

Worse than that, she seems…broken, somehow. Jay reaches gently toward her with one hand, but she shies away, shaking.

She’s terrified. Of him.

The thought aches. Jay tries to console her, again and again, but to no avail. She doesn’t seem to remember him, let alone trust him.

“Jessica, _please.”_

Jay hates the way his voice breaks when he kneels down beside her. He tries to make eye contact, catch some flash of recognition in her eyes, anything. A sob catches in her throat and she withdraws even further, her shivering getting worse.

A faint buzzing in the back of Jay’s mind alerts him of that… _thing’s_ presence. It’s here. Watching, like it always does, head doubtless tilted to one side in that curious, alien manner.

Jay turns. There it is. It flickers like it’s some sort of deadly mirage, but Jay knows better. He knows it’s real, even though he’s spent most of these four years ignoring the impossibility of its existence.

His instincts all tell him to run, to leave Jessica and just get the hell out of there. His fury over what this thing has done to Jessica, how it’s violated her mind and torn her psyche to pieces, tells him to charge the bastard, regardless of consequences. Jay remembers the last time he tried to fight the thing. He remembers the consequences. Seven months of consequences.

He doesn’t care. He drops his camera, stands, and walks toward it steadily, like he remembers Tim and Alex doing.

It all comes full circle.

He looks at it straight in its empty, blank face. It _stares_ back, even without eyes. Not in a way that seems taunting or malicious, but simply curious.

 _Please._ Jay says in his mind. He knows it can hear him in its own abstract, inhuman way. He feels his mind touch that surging alien thought. It terrifies him.

But his fear and pain over Jessica is stronger than his fear.

 _Please,_ he begs again. _Reverse it. Make her better. Make her **normal.** I don’t care what you have to do, what will happen to me. _

It tilts its head the other way. Intrigued, is it?

_I’ll do whatever it takes. Just make her better. Make her forget this, forget me, forget everything._

The thing continues to stare. Jay feels tears stinging the edges of his eyes but he savors them. They’re proof that he’s still human, and he knows he won’t be for much longer.

It’s worth it. Jessica is worth it. She doesn’t deserve this.

**_do we_ **

**_have a_ **

**_deal_?**

The words are horribly distorted, like the footage on Jay’s camera, but he can understand them. He nods.

_She forgets everything._

**_everything_ **

**_even you?_ **

Jay takes a deep breath. _Especially me._

**_done._ **

Jay closes his eyes. Tear tracks sting his face. The thing reaches toward him and his head fills with blessed darkness.


	13. remember me; tim and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Tim and Jay, and do either Get Me, Remember Me (how convenient that amnesia is a normal thing in MH) or Value Me. Or do all of them together. Whatever, I have a might need for bromance feels!**

“Tim? _Tim!”_

Jay nearly drops the camera and scrambles to his side. When ToTheArk had uploaded the video boasting his capture of “the liar,” Jay had known exactly who that was. And as much as he and Tim had disagreed in recent memory (and as much as it still chafed that Tim had left Jay _ziptied and helpless on the floor_ ), Jay owed Tim. Tim had gotten him out of his coma-like state after the events at Alex’s house. Now Jay was returning the favor.

So Jay had followed ToTheArk’s usual array of cryptic clues, tracking down his friend to find him here, tied to a chair and looking like he’d had a rough time of it.

Jay is grateful he brought one of Tim’s steak knives, the one he had spent half a day crawling across the floor to get to. He quickly cuts Tim free. The other man nearly slides to the ground and Jay barely succeeds in catching him.

“Tim?”

He looks unnaturally pale and oh  _geez,_ that violent shivering can _not_ be a good sign.

“Tim? Come on, buddy. Wake up.” Jay shakes him gently. “Come on. _Please.”_

_I’m sorry._

Jay grabs at his water bottle and clumsily tips its contents over Tim’s face. It’s a stupid idea, but he frankly has no idea what else to do.

He lets out a sigh of relief he didn’t even realize he was holding when Tim coughs, splutters, and his eyes flutter open. The relief fades when Tim’s expression fills with confusion.

“What - ?” he mutters. “Who - ?”

“It’s Jay. You’re okay now, you’re safe,” Jay rushes to console him. “We both screwed up but it’s okay now, all right?”

“I don’t…” Tim shakes his head, brow furrowed, and tries to stand. He topples almost immediately but, again, Jay catches him. “Who?”

Jay’s heart drops out of his chest.

“It’s Jay,” he repeats hollowly. “Do you remember?”

“Jay who?” Tim pushes himself out of Jay’s grasp, backing away. He wobbles unsteadily on his feet and grabs at the nearest wall to keep himself upright. “Look, I don’t…I don’t know who…” He brings one hand to his head, face twisting in pain. _“Aah.”_

“Tim?” Concerned, Jay moves toward his…well, “friend” wasn’t really the word for them anymore, was it? “Tim, please. It’s me. I know we kind of…fought, but - ”

“I don’t - ” Tim rasps, hand still pressed to the side of his head in obvious pain. “I don’t know you.”

Jay opens his mouth to refute that claim, to say something, anything. He finds he can’t. He thought he had anticipated every plausible scenario that would await him once he found Tim, including the dreadful possibility that he would only find a body.

This was somehow worse.

“Tim, please.” Jay’s voice trembles a bit. He doesn’t care. “You were - we were friends. Once.”

Tim looks back up, eyes shadowed with doubt. He staggers back a bit and has to cling to the wall all the tighter to stay on his feet. It’s clear his that his head is still hurting and the pain isn’t getting any better.

Jay scrambles to think of anything that could possibly help.

“You have medication!” he remembers abruptly. “Your jacket pocket, look.”

Tim obediently roots around in his pocket and pulls out the bottle, which Jay is dismayed to note is nearly empty. He shakes out one of the white capsules, studies it. He looks dubious.

“These are mine?”

“For as long as I can remember, you’ve always needed to take those.” Jay bites his lip, hoping Tim can bring himself to trust him. He holds out his water bottle a little anxiously. After a moment of hesitation, Tim accepts the proffered bottle and chases the pill with a mouthful of stale water. He soon visibly relaxes as the medication takes its effect.

“Better?”

Tim nods shakily. “Yeah. Thanks. But I, uh, I still don’t - “

“You still don’t remember me.” Jay swallows his despair and forces a smile. “That’s okay. There’s…not a whole lot to tell, anyway. You remember who you are, right? Where you live?”

“Yeah…”

“Good.” Jay grabs Tim’s hand and pushes his car keys into it. “Take these. My car is parked just outside. You’re at 79 South Creek Road, not too far from where you live, okay?”

“I don’t understand. I can’t - I can’t take your car!”

“I won’t need it.” Jay fights the sad smile, but it quirks at the corner of his mouth anyway. “You’ve got a chance to leave this behind. Take it.”

“Leave what behind?” Tim’s brow knits in confusion. “What’s going on?”

“It doesn’t matter. Just go.” When Tim vacillates, Jay flaps his hand impatiently at him. “Go! I’ve got…stuff to take care of here anyway.”

Tim reluctantly nods and leaves. Jay turns back to the apparently deserted building. He knows someone is lying in wait for him, whether it be ToTheArk, Alex, or a certain _something_ else.

Whatever happens next, he doubts he’ll last very long, not now that he’s alone. The thought is strange, surreal, almost alien in Jay’s head. So long he’s held onto hope, but there’s a feeling of dreadful finality clenched in the pit of his stomach. Everything that’s happened in the past four years has led to this moment, and he’s facing it completely alone.

But at least Tim has the opportunity to live in some kind of peace.

Jay smiles. For him, that’s enough.


	14. normal; alex and amy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Alex and Amy happy, normal at the college address until someone ( hoodie, tim, operator ect.) from their past shows up to stir things up again.**

It was almost easy to forget that only a few years prior, Alex’s life had been full of cameras and pain and panicked nights where he wondered how many hours he had lost. Now his life was, dare he say it?

_Normal._

Blissfully, blessedly normal. He had a life free from sinister film projects and nightmares and waking up with blood on his hands and unexplained tearing in his peripheral vision. He only need worry about silly mundane things, like groceries and class work and not waking Amy up when he came back from work late.

So eager was Alex to embrace the normalcy that he forgot that his past was only forgotten, not gone.

And one late night, Alex’s almost-forgotten past came back in the form of frantic knocking on the door at _it’s-fucking-early_ -o-clock in the morning.

Alex opened the door, peering drowsily to make out whoever was darkening his doorstep at this stupidly early hour.

There was no one. He scanned the inky darkness several times. A prank, then? Had he dreamed it, maybe?

Alex’s stomach dropped when he looked down and saw the note lying on the doorstep. He picked it up, heart thudding in his throat, jaw clenching when he recognized the untidy scrawl:

_**FOUND YOU** _

It had been wishful thinking, to imagine that Alex would ever really be free from the horrors of his past. And now it had just come back to hound him again.

“Alex?” Amy yawned as she made her way down the hallway. “What are you doing up? Was there someone at the door?”

Alex shut his eyes in despair and crumpled the note.

“I’m sorry, Amy.” He turned to face her. The confusion on her face nearly drove him to lie to her, to say that it was all going to be fine, but Alex knew he’d lied enough. “I have to go.”

It actually hurt for him to get the next sentence out.

“And I don’t think I’m coming back this time.”


	15. tell me; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Wow, this prompt is superb. Tell me Tim & J?**
> 
> the response: **alternate timeline starting mid-Entry #75**

Jay poked at the empty bags in the box. He was certain that the tape had been here in the entry ToTheArk had uploaded to the channel. He had watched it a dozen times.

Frustration boiled away inside him. The tape was important, he was certain. There was no other reason that ToTheArk would have explicitly pointed it out.

“Are you sure the tape wasn’t here?” Jay demanded for the umpteenth time. Tim hesitated, eye contact slipping away for just a second. When he didn’t answer immediately, Jay pressed the subject. “You saw it, didn’t you?”

Tim nodded.

“Yeah, okay. I did.” He reached in his pocket and took it out, holding it protectively in front of him. “I’ve had this for a while, actually. I wasn’t gonna tell you, but - ”

“Give it to me.” Jay held out his hand. His expression hardened into one of cold fury. Tim had lied to him. After all this time, he had.

“Jay, you gotta let me explain.” Tim held up one hand defensively as he confessed. “After you and I woke up outside that house, I found it in my pocket. I didn’t know what was on it until I watched it. And now I really wish I hadn’t.”

“You _lied,”_ Jay hissed, his voice low and threatening. “You lied to me this whole time.”

“I thought it would be better if you didn’t see it yet. Jay, please. What’s on this tape…it’s not something you should see.”

“Let me decide that.”

“Jay, it’s…it’s about Jessica.”

The effect those words had on Jay was instantaneous.

 _“Give it to me!”_ Jay almost _snarled,_ lunging at the tape with one hand outstretched. Tim dodged, nearly causing Jay to crash into the wall.

“Listen to me!” Tim insisted. “Please! What’s on this tape is going to change everything we’ve been working towards!”

 _“I - don’t - care.”_ Jay’s gaze was fixed on the tape. _“Give it to me.”_

Tim’s brow darkened. He took a step back.

“No.”

He turned to run, but Jay was quicker. He leaped at Tim and wrapped both arms around his legs, bringing him crashing to the ground. Jay scrambled to tear the tape from Tim’s grip.

“Get - off - ” growled Tim. _“Get off!”_

Jay felt his fingers wrap around the tape. He allowed Tim to thrust him away. He didn’t care. Gripping the tape victoriously, he tore out of the house.

“Jay!” He ignored Tim’s desperate cries. “Jay, wait!”

Tim had lied. Jay was going to find out the truth, once for and for all. And this time, Tim wouldn’t stop him.


	16. script supervisor; jay and alex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Amuse me J and Alex.**
> 
> the response: **Dialogue fic. Takes place pre-series, during the shooting of the student film.**

“Alex, I’m sure Tim didn’t mean it.”

“You saw him, Jay! When I handed him the script, he started _laughing.”_

“Well, you wrote some jokes in there, didn’t you?”

“He wasn’t reading the joke-y pages, Jay. He was reading the part where Brian confesses his love to Sarah. It’s _supposed_ to be _hear_ _tfelt.”_

"It is heartfelt! Maybe Tim just, uh…has a weird sense of humor?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Alex, man, look. I’m your script supervisor, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So there’s no way I’d ever let you include funny dialogue when it isn’t supposed to be funny, right?”

“…I guess.”

“Trust me, Alex. Your script is solid. More than solid. It’s perfect.”

“You really think so?”

“Positive. Tim is just…Tim, okay? He always laughed at weird stuff.”

“Yeah, all right. I guess he always did a bit, huh?”

Alex left Jay’s house with a jaunty smile on his face. As soon as he’d left, Jay let out a noisy sigh of relief, pleased that Alex hadn’t been able to detect how hard he was lying through his teeth.

It was a _really_ bad script.


	17. haunted; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Haunt me Jay Masky and Tam. -Q**
> 
> the response: **you didn’t specify which character gets to haunt who, so I used some creative freedom. Hope this is okay!**

It only took Jay a few days to get used to the peculiar sensation of being dead. He’d always been curious about what it was like.

As it turned out, death wasn’t very interesting. It wasn’t a whole lot different from being alive, except that now he was transparent and people couldn’t see him and instead of walking he got to hover about a foot off the ground, which was, admittedly, a pretty neat sensation.

But eventually Jay got bored of floating and lurking about, so he began to wander about looking for the people he’d know when he was alive. He wished he had friends he could check on, but as it was, all he had were vague acquaintances, enemies, and sort-of-allies-but-not-really?

The latter was what Tim was, anyway. Tim who, funnily enough, was the first one Jay found. Well, in a manner of speaking. Jay more or less stumbled upon him and he wasn’t really Tim at the moment.

When Jay found him, Tim was curled against a tree in Rosswood Park (where else?), familiar white mask over his face and spasms racking his whole body. Eventually his convulsions calmed down to the occasional twitch, then finally he stilled.

Jay watched, resentful yet curious. He’d never actually seen the transition between Tim and his masked counterpart.

The sun had nearly risen by the time Tim stirred again. He rose unsteadily to his feet. He looked disheveled and cold but did not let that stop him from tearing the mask vengefully from his face and flinging it to the ground.

As much as Jay and Tim had had their differences ( _lots_ of differences), Jay couldn’t help but feel sorry for the guy. Sure, death wasn’t a whole lot of fun, but at least Jay didn’t have to worry about horrific things watching him at all times or sleepless nights or waking up with hours spent unaccounted for.

Jay wanted to say something to Tim, but he couldn’t. He was, after all, dead. So he just kept watching as Tim shook himself and began trudging through the woods, taking the well-worn path back home.


	18. really great hair; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **idk how you take prompts,,,, bUT Id like to request some Jam c: hhhmm how about them meeting for the first time? alex needs tim for marble honets, and so he comes in to the group, and Jay meets him and gets a little crush on him and swoons over his sideburns**
> 
> the response: **Boy oh boy. I’ve written Jam all of once before, so I hope this satisfies!**

“Jay, meet Brian. Brian, this is Jay. He’s my script supervisor.” Jay thought he could detect a note of pride in Alex’s voice as he introduced the two of them. Brian, a friendly-looking guy with an honest, open face, extended a hand and Jay timidly took it.

“Good to meet you.” Having shaken Jay’s hand rather more enthusiastically than Jay was comfortable with, Brian turned to Alex. “So you want me in your film?”

“You and Sarah, yeah. You’re gonna be the two leads.”

“Sounds cool. What’s it about?”

Jay tuned out the rest of the conversation. He’d agreed to help Alex with his project, but in truth he found the idea of the whole thing…kind of boring, even if he’d never admit it to Alex’s face.

Instead he busied himself with examining Brian’s friend. He’d apparently come with him to meet Alex and Jay, though Jay couldn’t recall ever seeing him before. He looked distinctly uncomfortable with the whole introductory situation, one hand shoved in his pocket and the other fidgeting with a lighter.

He had _really_ great hair.

With _sideburns._

“Oh, this is Tim.” Brian interrupted Jay’s incredibly unfocused thought process. “He’s a friend of mine, really into music and stuff. Figured he might be able to help with the film soundtrack, maybe even act a bit.”

“Sounds great.” Alex scrutinized Tim with an air of mock professionalism before folding his arms and leaning toward Jay. “What d’you think?” he asked conspiratorially.

“Yeah. Sure. Okay.” Jay’s throat went dry. He was being _way_ too obvious, wasn’t he?

_Fantastic._

“You helped write the script, huh?” Tim asked.

_…crap he’s looking at me he’s looking at me uh um okay act cool act cool_

“Yeah, I, uh, I, I guess.”

_…shit._

“Sounds good.” Tim didn’t acknowledge Jay’s distinct lack of cool and kept tinkering with his lighter. Flooded with embarrassment, Jay jammed his hands into his pockets and stared miserably at the floor.

Typical. Fucking typical. He’d finally met someone new and in about five seconds he’d screwed it up.

“I should probably, uh, head out,” Tim spoke up finally, mercifully ending the awkward silence that had pervaded the conversation. “Just shoot me a text when you need me.”

 _“Number,”_ Jay barely squeaked out.

“Huh?” Tim froze, hand on doorknob.

“I’ll, um. I’ll need your number to text you.”

“Oh.” Tim blinked. “Okay. Sure.”

Despite his positively abysmal job at making a first impression, Jay couldn’t help but be thrilled that he’d at least had the courage to ask for Tim’s number.

And, more importantly, he’d actually _gotten_ Tim’s number.

This film project might not turn out to be so boring after all.


	19. raining; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **kiss me, jay and [character of choice]**
> 
> the response: **I know some people were asking for fluffy Jam earlier, so let’s see if I can do both, even though this is entirely new territory for me**

“Is it still raining?” asked Jay.

“Does it sound like it’s still raining?” Tim drawled, not opening his eyes.

“Yeah.”

“There’s your answer.”

This was supposed to have been their big offensive move, their attempt to invade enemy territory and take down Alex once and for all. They’d made decent headway into Rosswood Park before - of _course_ \- it started raining.

They’d been fortunate enough to stumble upon an abandoned shack in the middle of the woods, but until the rain let up, they were stuck. Tim was starting to doze off, having switched off the chest-cam, and leaned against one of the broken-down walls with crossed arms.

Jay rested against the opposite wall. He had turned off his camera as soon as the rain had started and had both hands folded protectively over it. The noise of the rain was starting to lull him to sleep as well.

“How long do you think we’ll be here?” Jay tried to fight his drowsiness by maintaining their conversation.

“Hm?”

“I said how long do you think we’ll be here?”

Shrug.

“Maybe we should just turn back.”

Silence.

“Tim?”

“Mm?”

“Did you hear me?”

“Mm.”

“Tim?”

No reply. Jay crawled over to his friend, whose arms had fallen to his sides. His head had also slipped down to one shoulder.

“Hey, Tim.” Jay gently shook his shoulder, the one unoccupied by his head. “Tim. Hey.”

“Mm?” The other man’s eyes flickered open.

“Try not to fall asleep, okay?”

“Iwasn’,” Tim mumbled sulkily. He straightened up his slumped posture as if to prove his point.

“Sure. Okay.” Jay failed to keep the note of amusement out of his voice. Tim glared at him.

“Like you _weren’t_ falling asleep,” Tim accused. “Between the number of times you got up and started pacing in the hotel last night, you’re just as tired as I am.”

“Am not.”

Tim snorted and closed his eyes again

Jay shifted closer. “Am not!”

One eye peeked open.

“I’ll have you know I slept _fine_ last night, thank you. Besides, since when did you care about my sleeping habits?”

“Since your sleeping habits started interfering with _my_ sleeping habits.”

"You take that back.” Jay inched even closer so his nose was only centimeters from brushing Tim’s.

“Never.”

“You monster.” And without really knowing why he did it, Jay kissed him.

 _That_ woke Tim up. His eyes flew open and he sat bolt upright.

“Did you just - ”

“Uh…”

“You did!”

“Um.”

Silence.

Jay had managed to fuck things up again, hadn’t he?

He almost fell over from shock when Tim finally spoke up.

“About damn time.”


	20. watching you; jay and the masked man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **pLS MAKE SOME FLUFFY JAYXMASKY OR SOME SHIT**

Jay suspected something was up the third morning he found the window opened with a very distinct memory of closing and locking it the night before. His room was otherwise undisturbed, looking exactly the way he’d left it prior to falling asleep. It was just that the window was always open.

The fourth night, he left the window open. Armed with a flashlight and some well-timed cups of coffee, Jay settled in to pull an all-night watch of his window to see what exactly was going on.

Jay started nodding off at around three but jolted awake to the sounds of the low ratting of the windowsill. At first he thought it was the wind until he was able to make out the dark shape crouched just outside the window. It looked to be pacing in a weirdly distressed manner.

Had this thing been sneaking into his bedroom during the night? Jay shuddered at the thought.

He clicked on his flashlight and shone the beam at the thing, aiming for its head. It jumped back and he caught a glimpse of a startlingly white face.

 _No,_ Jay amended as he took a closer look. _Not a face at all. A mask._

The masked figure retreated from the beam of light. It didn’t make a sound aside from the rustling of its footsteps as it backed away.

Realizing that the light frightened it, Jay quickly switched the flashlight off. The figure stopped cowering and crept back up to his windowsill. He saw its face peek at him, tilt to one side, then vanish for a split second. It took Jay a few minutes before he understood why he couldn’t see its face anymore - it was facing _away_ from his window, not toward it.

It continued to stand like that for the next twenty minutes, shoulders squared, stock-still, like some mute sentinel. It did not move, not even when Jay did.

Then the realization washed over him. The masked figure wasn’t creeping to his window to watch him; it was trying to _protect_ him.

That was a very strange thought. What was even stranger was that Jay found that thought…comforting?

“Do you…” Jay whispered. The masked figure turned to face him again. “Do you want to come in?”

Pause. Head tilt. Nod.

“Come on, then.”

It slid through the window quite effortlessly, almost as if it glided in. There was something  _not quite human_ about the way it moved.

Once inside, it leaped up to perch on top of his dresser like a feral cat.

“Are you trying to keep me safe?” Jay asked quietly.

Nod.

“Why?”

Head tilt.

Silence.

It didn’t seem to like to talk. Perhaps it simply wasn’t able to.

“You can stay here, if you want. Is that okay?”

Nod. Pause. _Emphatic_ nod.

“Okay.”

Jay switched off his lamp and rolled over. He could tell it was still there, his own masked gargoyle crouched on top of his dresser, but it had shifted its gaze back to the open window. Watching. Trying to keep him safe.

Ordinarily, Jay might have found the presence of this…stranger unsettling. But right now, he found he didn’t mind.

He didn’t mind at all.


	21. the tall man; tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **If you have time could you write a fic with Tim in that hospitable he went to when he was younger and the doctors interaction with him?**

Once upon a time, before there were sleepless nights in hotels, there were sleepless nights in white-walled rooms without windows. Nights filled with a mixture of terror and screaming and terrible, terrible pain.

—-

“Do you know what today is, Timothy?”

Timothy shakes his head. He doesn’t care. Instead he looks back at the wall and pretends there’s a window there so he can look out into the forest. He has to keep watching.

“It’s Friday. You know what happens tomorrow?”

Timothy still doesn’t care.

“Your mother is going to visit tomorrow. Isn’t that exciting?”

Timothy closes his eyes. Usually it _would_ be exciting, but things always got in the way. He would wait impatiently until one o’ clock before they would tell him that oh, silly her, she’d forgotten that she had made a doctor’s appointment for today or as it turned out she wasn’t feeling all that well for a visit and could Timothy please please forgive her, because she was really truly sorry she couldn’t make it and would definitely be around next week?

He doesn’t know at what point he stopped believing she was coming at all. But he’s smarter now, even if they’ve upped his dosage and given him tests and changed his medication a half-dozen times since the first time she’d chosen not to come. He knows she might as well be gone, because she never wants to come see him anymore.

He wishes he knew what he did wrong. If he’d done something to upset her, he wishes he could at least get a chance to fix it.

—-

“You’re not being very talkative today, Timothy. Why is that?”

Timothy sits cross-legged on the floor, wishing he could pretend not to be listening, but they stopped giving him crayons and paper after the third or fourth session, when they discovered he only ever used the black crayon and had in fact worn it down beyond use.

“Your mother says she’s sorry.”

Timothy shuts his eyes and pretends he’s in the middle of the forest. He hates the woods because whenever he’s there he can feel the tall man watching him in that way he did, but it’s better than here.

Anywhere’s better than here.

“Please, Timothy. She misses you.”

“No, she doesn’t.” Timothy stops trying to pretend. He looks up at the doctor mournfully.

“Of course she does!”

Timothy wishes the doctors wouldn’t lie.

—-

Fire burns through him, boiling through his veins and into his brain and he _screams._

It’s here, it’s watching him, he can feel it. For a just a second it flickers into the corners of his vision and, paranoia validated for the tiniest glimmer of a moment, Timothy points and screams and _howls_ for the doctors and nurses to stop sticking needles in him for just one minute so they can _see_ it.

“Timothy, it’s just a hallucination! All right? It’s important that you understand that it’s _not real!”_

“What the hell is wrong with him?”

“This always happens. Every time we think we’ve got his dosage sorted, something else goes wrong.”

“What, and he thinks there’s a guy with no face in his room?”

They don’t believe him. They _never_ believe him.

The burning doesn’t stop, but it dulls. The needles don’t make the pain stop; they only make him tired and forgetful.

He sees him just before everything fades, the tall man. He doesn’t have a face, but Timothy swears that if it did, it would be _smiling._

—-

“You’ve been doing really great, Timothy. Another few months and you’ll be ready to go to school with all the other kids your age.”

Tim has heard those words before, spoken with reassuring certainty. They won’t change anything. They never do.

The sharp-eyed nurse makes him take each of his pills and, once she is satisfied that he has, she leaves. Everyone leaves him in the end.

Tim waits until her footsteps have faded into nothing. Then he turns to the tall man, standing in the corners of his vision like always.

Watching.

“Do I have to do it?”

The tall man nods.

“I don’t want to.”

He feels it pressing into his mind, sending shivers of agony rippling down his spine.

“No! Stop!” He doesn’t want to start screaming again, because the doctors will come and fill him with needles and medication again, and he’d become dull and tired for days. “I’ll do it!”

The pain abruptly ceases.

Hands shaking, Tim retrieves the lighter he’d stolen from one of the doctors, the one who thinks no one knows he smokes.

He looks back at the tall man. It nods at him.

Tim holds his breath, scrunches his eyes shut, and flicks the lighter on.

He has to do what the tall man says, no matter what.


	22. RECORD; ensemble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Here. If you need a change of pace from crack. Set in a time during or before the filming of MH, a time when everyone was happy with just a hint of the coming menace.**

“I’m telling you guys, this place is _perfect_ for the film. Just wait till you see it.”

"It had better be perfect,” Brian complained good-naturedly. “This is quite a hike.”

“Just wait.” Alex’s eyes were shining with excitement. “Jay, you got the camera right?”

Jay pressed the red ‘RECORD’ button and pointed it at his friend, then tossed him a thumbs-up.

It didn’t take them long to reach the densely wooded area that Alex and Jay had gone location-scouting in just two days earlier. The area _was_ beautiful, with just enough light filtering through the trees to give it a warm glow but not so much that it would create a glare.

Alex busied himself handing everyone scripts while Jay fumbled with the tripod.

“Need some help with that?” Brian’s friend Tim, whom Jay had only met about a week ago for the sake of the film, offered.

“Sure.” Jay let him take over. Jay hadn’t expected to much like this Tim guy, but he wasn’t half bad, if a bit solemn. Would it kill him to crack a smile every now and then? It was hard to believe he and the friendly, easygoing Brian were such close friends.

“All right, let’s see if we can just do a run-through,” Alex ordered, every inch the student film director. “Seth, stop filming behind-the-scenes and get the camera on the tripod. We’ll start by blocking out the Brian and Sarah scenes.”

With nothing else to do, Jay and Tim hung back uncertainly as Sarah and Brian ran through the lines.

“Some dialogue, huh?” Tim snorted quietly. Jay didn’t think he was supposed to hear that. Tim must have noticed that he had overheard because he immediately became contrite. “I mean, it’s not…it’s not _that_ bad or anything. For, uh, for a student film.”

"I helped supervise,” Jay said, shrugging. “I’m the script supervisor.”

“So you helped write this thing?” Tim immediately seemed to regret his choice of words. “The, uh, the script?”

Jay glanced furtively in Alex’s direction. The director was busy trying to make sure Brian made the right hand gestures or some shit. He leaned close and muttered, “Only the good lines.”

Tim bit back a smirk, but Jay caught the corners of his mouth twitching. So Brian’s friend _did_ have a sense of humor after all.

The conversation ended when Brian got down on one knee to read his lines with an extra-dramatic flair. Sarah almost dropped her script laughing.

“Cut,” Alex interrupted, trying to scowl sternly, but Jay could tell he was just as amused by Brian’s antics as Sarah was.

“Hold up,” Seth called.

“What’s wrong?” Alex was at the tripod’s side in an instant.

“The camera’s - acting - glitchy - ” Seth punctuated each word with a light smack on the side of the camera. “It’s like it’s frozen or something.”

“Did you drop it or something?”

“No!” Seth looked positively insulted at the thought. “It was on the tripod the whole time!”

“Well, I’ll get it checked out later,” Alex sighed, rubbing at the back of his neck impatiently. “At least I brought a spare so we didn’t hike all the way up here for nothing. Here,” he tossed Jay his car keys. Jay fumbled the catch and dropped them, diving onto his hands and knees to retrieve them.

“What, uh - ” Jay stammered, face burning.

“Go get the other camera. It should be in the trunk. We’ll keep rehearsing here until you get back. And hurry!” he yelled as Jay hurried back down the trail. He didn’t mind being Alex’s gopher, but sometimes he wondered if that was the only reason he got brought along in the first place, to play run-and-fetch.

Jay shook the thought aside. It didn’t matter. It shouldn’t take longer than a few weeks to get the thing shot, and then he would never need to worry about it again.


	23. hot chocolate; brian and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Hoody makes hot chocolate in Tim's house.**

Tim was a light sleeper, so it didn’t take much to wake him. So when the faint clattering noise of cups and silverware spiraled out from the kitchen, Tim’s eyes were open almost immediately.

_A burglar?_

Tim had far worse problems than late night burglars, so the idea of being robbed was only darkly amusing to him.

_…something worse?_

That thought was less amusing.

Tim reached for the baseball bat he’d bought after the fourth time he’d woken up to find the window open and some of his pill bottles missing. Making barely a sound, he slunk out of his room and down the hallway. Years of sharing a body with a masked psychopath had made him adept at moving silently, a skill he didn’t like to think about but appreciated regardless.

The kitchen light was on.

 _Not a burglar,_ Tim decided. _Burglars wouldn’t be that stupid._

He couldn’t think of anyone who _would_ be that stupid. Even Jay had the good sense to leave the lights off when breaking and entering, though he would actually _knock_ _on the front door_ before resorting to breaking a window, which seemed counter-intuitive.

Tim chanced a peek into the kitchen. A familiar hooded shape was standing by his stove, facing away from him.

Good. Tim tightened his grip on his baseball bat with savage pleasure. He would enjoy beating the shit out of the hooded bastard who’d tormented him for years.

Tim charged out from the hall, bat at the ready, taking the hooded trespasser completely by surprise. They fell backwards onto the ground so Tim was standing over them, bat upraised, ready to mete out some blunt force punishment.

Until he saw what exactly the hooded person had been doing.

The milk was out, along with a saucepan, some slabs of baking chocolate…

Tim almost lowered the bat.

_They were making hot chocolate?_

The thought was so absurd he almost laughed, but the wave of nostalgia that struck him immediately afterwards wiped any thought of laughing from his head.

Distinct memories invaded his mind, memories of late nights spent over hot chocolate because he hadn’t bothered to buy coffee in weeks, sharing mugs of the stuff with…

“Brian?” Tim whispered hoarsely.

The hooded person, who had been tensed for Tim’s inevitable wrath, stilled.

It raised its frowning mask to stare at him dolefully.

 _“Brian?”_ Tim’s voice broke with disbelief. The bat slipped from his numb fingers and clattered to the ground.

As if spurred on by the abrupt noise, the hooded intruder sprang to their feet and tore out of the house.

Tim sank to his knees, not even trying to fight the hot tears as they spilled out.

_Brian._

His only friend in the whole world.

He’d spent so many days and nights puzzling over the identity of the hooded man, furious that he could never figure out who they were.

Now he wished he had never found out.


	24. one more lie; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **"Tim. Tell me one more lie. Tell me we're going to be okay after all of this."**

Tim had been so busy trying to keep Jay from entering the house that he didn’t even see the gun.

Jay must have gotten out of the zipties as soon as Tim left. They had both headed for 79 South Creek Road and had run into each other at the door. The rest was a haze of fists and accusatory yelling, but the image of the person in the hoodie aiming Alex’s gun at Tim’s head stood out. 

He’d been aiming for Tim, but the bullet hit Jay squarely in his midriff.

“Wha…” Jay didn’t seem to register that he was slowly, steadily bleeding out. He looked down at the patch of red seeping across his stomach, then up at Tim, then folded over like a broken marionette. Tim only just caught him before he hit the ground.

“Jay?” 

Tim stared, aghast, at the freely bleeding wound. The bullet had gone straight into Jay’s liver. He was going to die.

Painfully.

No, no, no, no, _no._ This wasn’t – _this wasn’t supposed to happen._

“Jay, pl – please, stay with me, okay?” Tim babbled without thinking, cradling his one-time-friend’s head with one hand. His thin, fragile body was already becoming limp and broken.

“Stay with me buddy, _stay with me, please.”_

_Don’t leave me alone. Not again._

“T – Tim?”

Jay’s unfocused gaze snapped to meet Tim’s eyes.

“Tim.”

“Jay?”

“T – Tell me,” Jay mumbled. Blood dribbled from one corner of his mouth. He was bleeding internally _no no please no._ “Tell me one more lie.”

_I can do that. I can lie._

_I’m a liar._

“T – Tell me we’re going to be okay after all this.”

“Yeah, absolutely.” Tim angrily shook away the tears pressing at the corners of his eyes and forced a melancholy smile. “We’ll be fine, both of us. And I’m sorry, okay? Sorry about everything.”

“S’doesn’t matter.” Jay’s voice was getting worryingly faint. “I j-just wish I’d known.”

“Known what?”

“The answers.”

Jay’s eyes closed. He was gone.

He was gone, and he never even got his answers.


	25. one more try; alex, brian, tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **can you write a continuation to the "Tell me one more lie" thing, where Tim goes berserk and wants to beat the crap out of Hoody (or Alex, in case he runs into him on the way)?**

Jay was gone.

Jay was gone and he wasn’t coming back.

Jay was gone and he wasn’t coming back and there was a gun lying on the floor, the gun that had killed him.

That hooded bastard must have dropped it.

_Good._

Tim grabbed it and stared at it. The handle seemed to swell and flicker in front of him. He couldn’t focus nothing was in focus everything just faded it was fading it was gone

gone like Jay

 _no he could not be gone he could not_ but Tim knew he was he was just gone and there was nothing

and it didn’t make any damn sense how he _was_ one minute and _was not_ the next

it didn’t matter

Tim could barely stand but he made himself stand, held himself steady by clinging to the wall with one hand. He could feel his vision blurring, a vague sense of unreality unraveling around his conscious thought.

But Tim’s slow-burning rage forced that sensation of unreality to organize itself, to solidify into one tangible thought:

_Get. Him._

Tim tore through unfamiliar halls and doorways, gun gripped so tightly that his fingers felt frozen - or was that just the cold, creeping numbness that was slowly suffusing his entire body?

No matter.

Tim didn’t care anymore, not about any of it, not about answers or cameras or masks or anything because _it didn’t matter_

He glimpsed the hooded shape fleeing, reaching toward a door.

 _“You!”_ Tim bellowed, voice tearing with fury. The hooded man glanced around their shoulder to look at him.

Only they weren’t masked anymore.

 _Brian - wait, what?_ Shock clouded Tim’s judgment for only a heartbeat. But it didn’t matter. None of it did. Brian had taken his only friend away, and he would suffer for it.

Tim ran at his old friend, gun upraised, finger tightening on the trigger -

he didn’t even _see_ Alex

who came up from behind

lead pipe

hurt

_pain_

throbbing, aching

_Jay_

why was everything fading

_Jay_

there was blood he was certain of it

was it his own

he couldn’t

_see_

there was

pain

_fading_

and


	26. loop of unhappiness; alex and amy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **I know you're busy so you can take however long you need but I want to request an Alex/Amy fic thank you kindly**

“So…what’s this thing you’re working on again?”

“Student film. Huge part of our grade.” Alex gratefully accepted the mug of tea Amy handed him.

“Well, you’ve been at it all day. Thought I’d bring you some sustenance.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem.” She leaned over to study the rough script he had began typing furiously the minute he’d gotten home. “What’s it about?”

“It’s called _Marble Hornets,”_ Alex answered with a note of pride. “Sort of a fresh take on the ‘stranger in a familiar land’ story with a side of young love. I’m hoping for Brian and Sarah to be my leads.”

“Brian and Sarah, huh?” She wrapped her arms around him from behind and put her chin on his shoulder. “You didn’t want to assign the role of leads to us? We wouldn’t need to fake any of the chemistry,” she teased gently.

Alex closed his eyes and leaned back into her. He would never admit that he found her idea a little bit tempting.

“You gonna get some sleep eventually?” asked Amy.

“Yeah, no worries.” Alex returned his attention to his budding script. “I just gotta work out this scene. It’s really pivotal to the whole story.”

“Mm. Anything I can do to help?”

“I think the muse just needs to ponder for a little bit,” Alex said in a mock-serious tone. “The stroke of brilliance will arrive soon. I can feel it.”

“Well, just stay away from phrases like ‘loops of unhappiness’ and you should be fine.” Amy planted a kiss on her boyfriend’s cheek and left the room.

Alex picked up exactly three words from her parting advice. His eyes lit up with an inspired glow.

 _“Loop of unhappiness,”_ he whispered, hammering feverishly away at his laptop. “That’s _perfect.”_


	27. ukulele; tim and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **A fluffy jamfic that takes place a bit before entry 72 where they discuss Tim's rad (or not so much) ukulele playing skills.**

Another day’s drive and they would reach Alex’s old address. Neither of them were sure what they’d find there, but hopefully it would be something. They weren’t looking for specifics anymore. Just something. Anything.

Answers.

The hotel room was no less cheap than any of the others they’d crashed in, but there was something about the colors of the walls and the way the room was set up that made Tim antsy. He tossed and turned all night before giving up on sleep entirely.

He was sure to be quiet as he slipped outside. Jay was a light sleeper; even the tiniest of noises would wake him.

Tim fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette and realized he’d left the pack inside the room. He considered going back inside to get it but thought better of it. He might wake up Jay in the process. Besides, the nicotine would only make him even more restless.

Instead Tim stood outside in the deserted hotel parking lot and breathed in the crisp night air. It stung his lungs but he relished the feeling. It was better than being in a too-dark, too-cramped hotel room.

Eventually Tim began to shiver from the cold, so he headed back inside. He was as silent as possible when he closed the door behind him, but when he started making his way back to the bed he found that Jay had woken up regardless.

“Sorry,” Tim muttered.

“It’s fine.” Jay sat up. “I was awake before you came back in. I didn’t know where you went.”

“Just outside for a bit.” Tim sat down on his bed and scrubbed a hand across his face. “Needed some fresh air.”

Jay nodded. He fidgeted with the worn corner of the sheets for a minute before piping up again.

“Tim?”

“Hm?”

“Did you ever play ukelele?”

“What?”

That was probably the last question Tim had been expecting Jay to ask.

“In some of the old tapes there were, you were, uh, you were playing ukelele.”

Had that really only been seven years ago? The memories felt so distant.

“Yeah, I mean,” Tim shrugged. “I got one as a gift. I think Alex made me play it for the soundtrack, you know, the one for his film?”

“Did he?” Jay actually grinned a little at that. “Were you any good?”

Tim considered the question for a minute.

“No.”

Jay laughed. So did Tim, though he couldn’t completely conceal his surprise. The whole time he’d known Jay, even before all…this…had happened, he didn’t think he could ever recall seeing the other man smile. It was strange to see him look genuinely happy.

Strange, but nice, Tim decided. And if they ever got through this he swore he’d do whatever he could to see that smile again.


	28. lightweight; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **fLUFFY JAM PLEASE PLEASE**

It had been some innocent fun. Tim hadn’t meant any harm. It was supposed to have been a quiet night with some tipsy adventures on the side. How was _he_ supposed to know Jay couldn’t hold his liquor?

As it was, Tim had to half-drag, half-carry his friend back to the hotel and lug him onto one of the beds. Remarkably, Jay hadn’t conked out yet. He was still trying to hold a decent conversation, the poor soul.

“Y’know who I _miss_ sometimes?” Jay slurred.

"Who?” Tim played along as he took off his friend’s shoes and tried to get him to lie down - _no, stay put, damnit_ \- under the covers.

_“Rocky.”_

Tim stopped his caretaking for a second to blink incredulously.

“What, you mean Alex’s dog?”

“Was real sweet, y’know? Never - never complained or anything.” Jay’s eyes began to lose focus.

“Okay, buddy.” Tim carefully laid his friend’s head down on the pillow and rolled him onto his side. “I think that’s enough for one night.”

“Good conversationalist,” Jay rambled on. “Never really, ah - really said much. Good listener, though.”

“I’m sure they were.”

A brief pause. Tim held his breath. Had Jay dropped off?

“Tim?”

Evidently not.

“Yeah?” Tim wearily took off his own jacket and shoes, hoping he could maybe grab a few hours tonight before Jay woke him up early the next morning, doubtless with the worst hangover he’d had in years.

“I think you’re a pretty swell guy.”

Tim stopped. The sentiment was oddly warming. Then he shook himself; the man was _drunk._ Of course he’d say shit like this.

“Really, I mean it.”

“Thanks, buddy. Now, uh, do me a favor and get some sleep. Okay?”

“Mm.”

Tim took the noncommittal grunt for a  _‘yes'_ and was finally able to lie down, breathe out a sigh of relief, and close his eyes.

Blessed silence prevailed.

“Tim?”

Never mind, then. That would have been too easy.

“What?”

“You’re kinda pretty.”

Silence.

“Go to sleep, dumbass.”


	29. coconut and vanilla; jay, alex, tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **cAN YOU MAKE A FIC ABOUT JAY AND TIM AND ALEX GOING OUT TO GET ICECREAM AND THE GUY MESSES UP THE ORDERS AND JAY GOT THE FLAVOR TIM WANTED SO WENT JAYTOOK A BITE OF IT OR SOMETHING TIM KISSES HIM AND TAKES IT AND ALEX IS UPSET BCUS HE IS 3RD WHEEL**

“Why are we even doing this, again?”

“I’m hungry.”

“For ice cream? Alex, it’s _raining._ That’s why we couldn’t film today, remember?”

“Yeah, I know. I don’t care. I want ice cream.”

“What are you, twelve?” Jay snorted. But he and Tim both got in line behind Alex to order.

Tim hung back, hands in pockets. He’d only come along because he thought they were actually going to do some filming today, but now that they’d been sidetracked he was thinking about just being done with it and going home. He didn’t really know Alex or Jay well enough for this not to be awkward in some way.

“What are you getting, Tim?”

Jay looked so excited that Tim immediately changed his mind.

“Uh, vanilla.”

“Vanilla?” Alex frowned. “That’s like the most boring flavor imaginable. It’s not even technically a _flavor._ That’s how boring it is.”

“I like it.” Tim remembered how when his mother used to visit him in the hospital, sometimes she would bring him vanilla ice cream.

That was a long time ago. No point in thinking about it now.

“How about you, Alex?”

“Hm?”

“What are _you_ getting if my vanilla is so deserving of your scorn?”

Alex grinned. “Double fudge chocolate. The devil’s food.” With that, he turned to the counter to order.

Tim was starting to feel comfortable enough around these people to relax a little. He and Jay ordered next and took their ice cream back to a table.

"You’re not gonna make us eat outside, are you?” Jay teased Alex.

“Shut up,” he answered playfully, digging a plastic spoon into his chocolate masterpiece. Jay and Tim did the same.

“Hold on.” Jay frowned at his ice cream. “I don’t think this is what I ordered. This doesn’t taste like - ”

 _“Coconut?”_ Tim coughed and stared at the offending ice cream. “Who the hell orders coconut?”

Jay raised a timid hand.

“You like _coconut?”_

"It’s more interesting than vanilla!” Jay stabbed his own plastic spoon at his own ice cream that was most certainly not coconut. “I think the guy mixed up our orders.”

“Only one way to fix that.” So Tim kissed him.

Jay sat dumbfounded while Tim swapped Jay’s coconut for his vanilla. He resumed eating as if nothing had happened, trying not to laugh at the deer-in-headlights looks on both Jay _and_ Alex’s face.

Alex recovered first.

“Get a room, you two,” he muttered good-naturedly. “You with your coconut and vanilla abominations.”


	30. fair enough; jay, alex, tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **can I have some jamlex??? aka jay x tim x alex??/**

Filming clearly wasn’t happening today, but they’d still gone back to Alex’s house to fool around and pretend they were going to actually work on the movie.

It didn’t take long for them to get hopelessly off track. It just so happened that Alex had an overabundance of beers in his fridge that he needed them to take off his hands.

 _“Please,_ Jay, you’re such a lightweight,” Alex was saying disparagingly. “Two shots and you’re down. Trust me, I’d know.” He tossed Tim a conspiratorial wink.

“Am not! There was something in those shots the last time…” Jay rubbed the back of his head in memory of one of the most truly awful hangovers he’d ever experienced. “And it’s not like you can hold your own either. Have you forgotten that night at Seth’s?”

Alex actually looked at the floor in embarrassment at that one. “That was _one_ time.”

“The poor guy started drunk-texting,” Jay informed Tim. “Drunk-texting _Brian,_ no less.”

Tim had to laugh at that one. He could only imagine what Brian’s reactions had been.

It only took another hour before all three of them were hopelessly smashed. Jay and Alex were, at least. Tim could hold his liquor a little better, but he couldn’t deny that he was beginning to feel it.

Jay kept trying to kiss Tim but every time he tried he lost his balance and fell and Alex would start laughing. So Jay settled for giving Alex a sloppy peck on the forehead instead.

None of them expected that. For a second they all sat there staring. Then Alex shrugged.

“To hell with it.”

And kissed Jay back, full on the lips.

“You guys wanna get a room?” Tim chuckled, mirroring Alex’s complaint from earlier.

“Nah,” said Jay. He tried to kiss Tim for the umpteenth time but this time, he actually succeeded.

“Fair enough,” said Tim.


	31. mirrored; tim and the masked man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Tim looks in a mirror one night and sees the white mask of his other looking back rather than his usual reflection, even though he knows its not on his face and hes in control. A thing about conflict between them? Tim telling the other how much he hates him perhaps...A classic Mirror scene.**
> 
> the response: **i hope this doesn’t come off as too pretentious**

This was cutting it way too close. Tim could feel his hands shaking as he uncapped his bottle and tipped far too much medication into his open palm.

He could barely breathe for all the coughs racking his body. Almost as if there was something pressed around his face, suffocating him, muffling him, and come to think of it he swore he could see a pale splotch of white in the bathroom mirror in the place of his face -

_No._

It wouldn’t come to that, not again.

Pills. Pills. He needed to take the pills. He needed to take them _right fucking now._

_-let us out-_

He ignored the voice. He could feel it stirring just behind the haze of medication, the haze that was rapidly lifting. Tim’s hands were shaking so hard that several of his precious capsules spilled from the bottle and clattered to the floor.

_Shit._

He dove to the floor to retrieve them.

_-let. us. out.-_

He gritted his teeth, pushing the voice from his head with savage determination. He scooped up the fallen pills and tipped them back into the bottle.

_-l_ _et us out-_

**_-NOW-_ **

_Not a chance._

Tim didn’t much feel like waking up in the middle of Rosswood Park with a pounding headache and blood on his hands.

He finally dry-swallowed two of the pills and chased them with a gulp of water. He glared at his reflection in the mirror, watching the flickering white shade of a mask fade from sight.

_That was too close._

He grimaced as he shoved the bottle of pills into his pocket. He could still feel it lurking in the back of his skull.

Tim pressed a palm to his temple to ease his throbbing skull. The medicine had not eliminated the pain, only dulled it.

He would cut it out of him if he could. He’d wished for a normal life often enough, but he’d relinquish all of it, _all_ of it - hope for a happy, blissful life far away from faceless monsters and seizures and nights of no sleep - for the chance to evict this damn _thing_ from his body.

He’d give anything to have peace of mind, _literally_ peace of mind, to have the blissful relief of knowing he was the only one in his head.

And that would never happen.


	32. documentary on hotels; jay and jessica

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **jay and Jessica, first date, make it sweet, PLEASE!**

“Sorry about the mess.” Jay could tell he was going to be apologizing a lot as he opened the door for Jessica. “Years of being on the run from a faceless monster really puts a drain on your bank account.”

“It’s fine, I get it. New place, right?”

“Yeah. My old one kind of, uh…burned down. So,” Jay hastened to change the subject. “I wish we could actually, uh, go someplace, but…”

“No, it’s all good.” Jessica pulled out a DVD and waved it. “I brought this.”

“What - ” Jay took it and flipped it over, reading the synopsis on the back. Then he shut his eyes in disbelief. “You are…this is…you literally brought a documentary on hotels.”

“It was too good a chance to pass up.”

“I don’t know whether to be horrified or amused.”

“The latter, please. I think we’ve all had enough of the former for a lifetime?”

“Definitely.” Jay flipped open the DVD case. “I sincerely hope this documentary is as boring as it looks. I think I could do with a little ‘boring’ after everything.”

“As long as ‘boring’ includes popcorn and beds of the non-hotel variety, I am _very_ okay with that,” Jessica laughed.  



	33. red light, green light; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Tim is jealous that Jay kissed Jessica and does something about it.**

“So, uh…you and Jessica, huh?”

“Um. Sorta. I guess.”

“Cool.”

“I mean, I just _kissed _her. Wasn’t an undying declaration of love or anything.”

“Yeah, no. ‘Course not.”

Tim and Jay sat awkwardly in the car, waiting for the light to stop being anything other than stubborn red. Tim drummed his fingers on the wheel. Jay looked out the window at the rainy street. There was nothing there that could capture his interest for very long, so he switched to looking back out the front windshield. Then looking at Tim. Then at his feet. Then out the window again.

Finally he could put up with the terse silence no longer.

“Tim, uh…”

“Yeah?” Tim almost snapped out the word, eyes glued on the light that remained obstinately, infuriatingly red.

“Are you, um…are you okay?”

“Yep. All good here. Fine.”

Jay was not fooled. He could practically see the tension simmering away in the way Tim gripped the wheel with white-knuckled hands and how rigidly he held himself.

“Look, you can tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong, Jay.”

“Oh yeah?” Jay raised and eyebrow, unconvinced.

“I think this light’s broken.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I wasn’t changing the subject!”

“Case in point.”

Tim transferred his scowl from the light to Jay then back to the light.

“Nothing’s wrong. I just want this stupid light to change so I can get home.”

“Are you sure that’s it?”

Tim tightened his jaw. If it was even possible, his glower at the light intensified.

“I’m fine, Jay. Just ‘cause I don’t have a wonderful happy life with date nights every weekend and stupid documentaries to watch - ”

“Holy shit, Tim, are you _jealous?”_

“What? _No!” _Jay didn’t think he’d ever seen someone backpedal so wildly. “No, I’m not jealous! What kind of, uh, what kinda question is that?”

"I’m just asking!”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Sure.”

_“Jay…" _Tim ground out the syllable for much longer than he needed to, the warning heavy in his tone.

"I said sure! Fine! You’re not jealous! I get it, end of story.”

Silence pervaded. _Highly _uncomfortable silence.

“Tim, are you _sure - “_

"Oh for the love of - ”

And Tim kissed him.

Jay sat there for a solid minute, too shocked to move. And just when he was beginning to think, hey, this isn’t all that bad, in fact it’s actually really nice, like _really _nice, a movement in the corner of his eye diverted his attention.

 _“Grbbblm!”_ he tried to speak through the other man’s fierce hold on his lips. Tim finally broke away. They were both more than a little breathless.

“Uh.” Jay pointed a slightly trembling hand at the light. “Green.”

“Oh. Um. Right.” Tim slammed a foot on the gas and they sped down the rain-darkened road.

They didn’t exchange another word the whole ride back. Both were grateful for the cover of the overcast darkness.

But even then, they were both smiling.


	34. tall, dark, and kitteny; the operator and the hooded man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Hoody walks in on Operator playing with kittens.**

He’d left Kralie at 79 South Creek Road only for a little while, to free Jay. He shook his hooded head in frustration that Tim had been stupid enough to leave him behind, tied up and helpless and far away from where he needed to be.

Tim was always getting in the way. Jay had been easy enough to string along before Tim had come along and got him thinking at least semi-rationally. Ordinarily he wouldn’t mind - allies were few and far between after all, and if Tim was suppressing his other half at least his more rational self could help them - except that Tim was little more than a mix of lies and insecurity and self-blame.

No matter. He would deal with Tim when he came. Right now he had a prisoner to worry about.

Which was why he was startled that, when he entered the place he was holding Kralie, Kralie was no longer there.

No, instead there it was, faceless and terrible and…

…and playing with kittens?

In what universe did this make sense?

It held its long arms-but-not-arms over a litter of kittens scampering on the ground. It tilted its head to one side. Without an expression, it was impossible to tell what it was feeling. Curious, perhaps? Amused?

Oh, wait, no. Hungry.


	35. hooded; tim and brian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **HOody's unmasking?**

Tim readied the knife in his right hand, camera in his left. He wasn’t even sure why he still carried the camera, except perhaps that he’d gotten so used to holding it when he and Jay had been working together.

The thought filled him with a mixture of anger and regret, a sort of controlled bitterness that he would have to ignore until this was all over. He and Jay could settle everything once their two main threats were removed.

Of course, that was considering Jay wasn’t all the way gone by the time this was over. And considering they both lived through it. At this point, Tim wasn’t optimistic about either point.

Regardless, he knew the only way out was to see this through to the end. He’d been plagued by nightmares and monsters and cryptic messages his entire life and he was ready for it all to be _over._

The door of 79 South Creek Road was unlocked and ajar, to Tim’s lack of surprise. He pushed the door open fully and stuck the camera into the room, scanning it for enemies.

No one.

Good?

Was that a good thing?

Knowing Tim’s luck, likely no.

He adjusted his grip on the knife yet again, camera held in front of him for…well, he supposed for security’s sake.

And it was because of that stupid camera that he was blindsided and tackled. The camera left his hand as soon as he hit the ground and he immediately forgot about it, rolling onto his back to push the darkly familiar hooded shape off him. It was trying to snake its black-gloved hands around his neck. Tim countered by slashing wildly with the knife.

At one point he actually managed to throw the hooded person off and scramble to his feet, but they promptly threw themselves back at him, hands reaching for his throat.

They both hit the ground hard. Tim was too winded to force his assailant off him, but they were no longer trying to strangle him. He could feel them moving feebly, almost twitching.

_What - ?_

Tim caught his breath enough to roll his hooded attacker off him for the second time. And his eyes fell on the knife that had gotten buried in their chest, and he realized why they were no longer struggling.

“No.”

He’d raged about how much he hated the person in the hoodie, how much he wanted to catch them and make them sorry for all they’d plagued him and Jay for so long. And, yeah, maybe he’d occasionally voiced the desire to give them one or two good punches in the face.

But he’d never wanted this.

“No, I - I’m _sorry,_ I - “

The hooded person made a choking sound, like they were trying to speak. They raised one trembling hand up to their masked face. The indication was clear.

Tim knelt down and slowly pulled the mask off. He’d imagined this moment, triumphantly tearing the hood and mask off his mysterious tormentor and exposing their identity.

None of his fantasies had gone like this.

And he’d never expected their identity to be the only friend he’d ever had.

“Brian.” Tim couldn’t even muster a hint of surprise in his voice. He could never have anticipated this, that his only friend in the entire world had willingly hurt him, taken his medication, torn apart his and Jay’s fragile trust in one another, but soon it wouldn’t matter.

Brian looked pale and gaunt and the patch of red was spreading further and further across his chest. He didn’t say anything. All he could do was give Tim a single, sad smile.

Tim shut his eyes as his friend’s life ebbed out on the floor of 79 South Creek Road. Hot tears stung his eyes and face.

It wasn’t worth this. Answers, peace of mind, peace of _life,_ none of it.

Because despite his best efforts, despite everything he’d done to see this through to the end, Tim had still ended up alone.


	36. he might not smile much; brian and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Brian and Tim with platonic Fluff.**

Brian hadn’t been planning on staying up late but then Tim had showed up at the door looking so incredibly lost and desperate that any concerns about lack of sleep evaporated.

Ten minutes later they were sitting in Brian’s living room, completely silent. Tim was staring at the floor, hugging himself. He looked to be shaking pretty fiercely, and Brian couldn’t blame him - the man wasn’t wearing a jacket and it was raining outside. He wasn’t sure why Tim had trekked all the way to his apartment in the frigid fall rain, but Tim didn’t look like he wanted to discuss it.

So Brian didn’t ask.

There were a lot of unanswered questions with Tim - why so many doctor’s appointments, why did he abruptly stop answering his phone the other night, why was there a fresh smattering of bruises on his face, and why did he need all that medication anyway - but Brian never poked, never prodded, never asked. Any time anyone strayed dangerously near those topics in casual conversation, Tim would get this hunted look in his eyes, a mixture of terror and crippling insecurity, and Brian would take it upon himself to quickly steer the discussion away.

Whatever problems Tim was going through, he had clearly decided to work through them himself and possessed a dark fear that someone else would impede on that privacy.

Yes, being Tim’s friend came with certain responsibilities (along with a slew of medical issues) but Brian didn’t mind that because Tim was loyal and reliable and a damn good musician and he might not smile much but whenever he did it made nights like these well worth it.

And that was the mission Brian took upon himself tonight. His friend looked so despondent, so downright miserable, that he was going to see if he could get him to smile, however fleetingly.

“Are you hungry?”

Tim sniffed a bit and shook his head, eyes still trained on the floor. He looked somewhat ashamed, though that didn’t make much sense unless he was blaming himself for keeping Brian up.

Typical. Much as he enjoyed his friend’s company, Brian couldn’t deny that he was a bundle of self-blame and anxiety.

“Want coffee?”

Pause. Nod.

“‘Kay. I’ll be right back. Cool?”

Another nod, then a sniff.

“Lemme get you a blanket too. Is that all right? You look soaked.”

Tim actually looked up. Then he nodded.

It only took a few minutes for Brian to return with a fresh pot of coffee and an old wool blanket. He began to drape it around his friend’s shoulders. Tim almost jumped at first, obviously not expecting the sudden contact.

“Sorry.” Brian handed him the blanket instead. He was being jumpier than usual tonight.

“No, I…” Tim looked like he was going to say more, reconsidered, then transferred his gaze to the floor again. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, man, it’s fine.” Brian handed him a mug and poured him a fresh cup. “Whatever’s happened tonight, whatever’s going on, I just hope you’re doing okay. Okay?”

Tim sipped the coffee immediately, ignoring the fact that it was still scalding hot. He didn’t seem to mind. “Okay. And, uh, thanks.”

“It’s what I’m here for.” Brian nodded at Tim’s mug. “Sure you don’t want sugar in that or anything?”

“Black is fine.”

“If you’re sure, man.” Brian dropped two cubes in his and stirred. “I doubt anything good is on TV right now, unless you’re interested in Spanish soap reruns.”

Tim actually smirked a bit at that one.

“Was that a smile?” Brian teased.

“What? No.”

“Okay, sure. Whatever you say.”

“Shut up.”

Brian cracked a wide grin. Mission successful.


	37. lostwood park; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Jay and Tim find someones two year old in the woods. They end up stuck with the kid till they finally find their mom.**

“Tim, make her stop.”

“Stop what?”

He turned and almost burst out laughing. The toddler, surely no more than two or three years old, was clinging fiercely to Jay’s leg. Jay cast Tim a desperate _“help me”_ look that only made Tim want to laugh harder.

“Well, it’s certainly a faster mode of transportation than making her walk.”

“Tim, _please.”_ Jay looked positively _terrified._ Did the man have _no_ idea how to handle kids?

Obviously not.

“Fine.” Tim knelt down and held his arms open. “Hey.”

The girl poked her head out from behind Jay’s leg.

“Hey, you wanna give poor Jay a break for a little bit? I can carry you.”

The girl considered.

“I’m a much faster walker than he is,” Tim said consolingly. “Besides, he’s got a funny face.”

The girl was convinced. She let him lift her up (to the accompaniment of Jay’s disgruntled “I do _not”)_ and carry her securely.

“The _camera - “_

“Chest-camera’s fine, Jay, don’t worry.”

Jay fell into a peeved silence. Once again, Tim had to suppress a grin.

They weren’t sure where the child had come from or where her parents were, but she sure didn’t belong in the middle of Rosswood Park. She was lucky that Tim and Jay had found her before someone or, more sinisterly, some _thing_ else did.

Yet now they had a bit of a dilemma.

“Let’s just head back to the parking lot,” suggested Jay. “There’s probably a visitor’s desk there somewhere.”

“You forget I’ve lived in this area for most of my life. I’ve never seen anything like that here.”

“Well, what do _you_ recommend? Cause in case you haven’t noticed, Tim, we can’t exactly take her with us.”

Tim didn’t have an answer. He just knew he didn’t want this girl going back to her parents with stories about how the “tall man” had saved her. He’d thought it was his friend at first too, back when…

Well, there was no need to think about that.

"Well?”

“Hm?”

“Any ideas?”

“Uh…” Tim racked his brains. Nothing. “I guess parking lot it is, then.”

They saw the girl’s worried parents speaking to a police man just outside the forest. They exchanged a quick glance.

“Better not,” Jay muttered in response to the unspoken question of whether they should approach them directly. Tim silently agreed. Things were bad enough without them dragging these people into their tangled, messy lives. Hopefully they would know better than to come back here.

“See your parents?” Tim asked the toddler. He pointed straight ahead and she nodded. “I’m gonna put you down. Go tell them you’re okay, all right?”

She nodded and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

“Good.” Tim set her down and she wobbled off toward her parents in the strange, uncoordinated walk that all toddlers had.

“You know, I think we did something good for once,” Tim admitted once he and Jay had seen the girl reach her family. They headed back to their own parked cars.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Actually feels kinda nice.”

Jay shrugged. He seemed more frustrated than relieved, but Tim didn’t care.

He and Jay had ensured that this girl would never be like Tim, and that was good.


	38. they were so worried; jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Family: Either Jay OR Alex goes home on a whim after months of being 'Missing' , his parents are there, they were looking for him.**

Jay knocks on the door. No one answers, so he rings the doorbell.

Still nothing.

Sure, it’s been a while - well over four years now - but surely Jay hasn’t forgotten his parents’ address? He knocks again. A dull hopelessness settles into him. After all this, after everything, he just wanted someplace to go back to. He has felt so alone these past few years, with no home, no friends, nothing to go back to or cling to in remembrance of whatever had passed for a happier time.

And all Jay wanted was to go home.

He sits on the front steps outside the locked doors and puts his head in his hands. He feels tears straining to escape his closed lids.

After a while he takes out his camera. His finger hovers over the ‘RECORD’ button. He considers smashing the damn thing against the concrete.

“Jay?”

He looks up.

And they’re there - wonderfully, inexplicably _there_ \- looking as if they had been out walking for whatever reason, whatever stupid _stupid_ reason, and he had almost missed them.

“Jay, is that you?”

He dashes a hand across his face. He doesn’t care if he cries though, because his parents are crying too. They’re hugging him and saying things like they’d been _so worried_ and _he’d been gone for so long_ and _why hadn’t he called?_

Jay can’t answer. He can’t summon the words to explain what’s happened these past few years. And even if he could, he doesn’t think he should say.

He’s sorry, he tells them over and over again. He’s sorry he never called or wrote or anything. He’s sorry he’s only come back now, years later, without any warning or explanation. He’s sorry he worried them.

Fuck, he’s sorry for _everything._

It doesn’t matter, they say. It doesn’t matter.

And it doesn’t. Because for the first time in Jay couldn’t even remember how long, he is home.


	39. ham sandwich; masked man and hooded man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **I DONT KNOW IF YOU STILL DO ASK SUGGESTED WRITING BUT UHMMM, HOODY FINDS MASKY EATING A HAM SANDWICH. GO.**

He was irritated. He’d stolen Tim’s medication days ago and his other, more useful self was yet to show up to help.

He missed his masked cohort. They had made a solid team, and they helped each other.

Shaking his head with frustration, he returned to his…well, it wasn’t particularly a ‘house’ and it wasn’t really a ‘home,’ either. It had his tiny stash of pills and a mattress and that was about as close to home as someone like him could get.

He entered the decrepit building and went to sit dejectedly on his mattress, only to find there was someone already sitting on it.

Tim-but-not-Tim sat there, happily consuming a ham sandwich.

(He contemplated that this did not make much sense as not-Tim was wearing a mask at the time, but he was too confused to question this affront to the laws of physics.)

If he had a voice he would have asked his masked assistant what the fuck he thought he was doing but as it was he could not speak so he did not.

He just stood there and glared.

And realized that glaring was pointless because he, too, wore a mask. True, it was frowning - and thus expressed his current mood quite excellently - but it was not sufficient. So instead he strode over and tore the ham sandwich from not-Tim’s hands and prepared himself to fling it against the building wall.

Tim’s other self began to get agitated at that point. Were they not wearing a mask, he had the distinct feeling they would be looking rather despondent.

He sighed. Looked at the sandwich.

With another weary sigh, he returned it. He left the building to the sounds of his masked associate being as useless as possible while they ate their stupid ham sandwich.


	40. discussion; tim and the masked man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: **I would like to read a serious (but friendly) conversation between Masky and Tim (inside their head) about Jay and if it is save to trust him anymore (after entry 77).**

_-you know we cannot trust him-_

_Well, yeah. Kinda why I tied him up._

_-it will not work for long-_

_I know. But I don’t want the guy starving to death, all right?_

_-you should have let us take care of it-_

Tim shook himself, trying to focus on the long drive ahead. Things were difficult enough with a secondary personality crammed in his head; the last thing he needed was for he…they… _it?_ …to become self-aware. But lately, with the medication throwing up a strong barrier between him and his other self, the divisions between the two had become clearer.

Unfortunately, it also meant a marked influx of distracting arguments in a head that was only built for one brain.

_I’m not going to let you hurt Jay. Not again._

_-we would only have ensured he would not follow-_

_What, by breaking his leg? Yeah, no thanks. I only want him safe - I don’t want him to_ hate _me after all this._

_-you really think he does not already?-_

Tim cut off the argument there. When his psychopathic, irrational self was starting to sound reasonable, that was a good sign he needed to ground himself back in reality. He could feel his other self’s mild irritation at being so blatantly ignored, but he didn’t care.

He’d done what he could for Jay. And now Tim was going to end this before any further harm could come to either of them.

_-it will not be that simple-_

They had a point. Tim shook the thought aside.

_Shut up._


	41. lying wooden boy; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: **but could you do a fic with something along the lines of "imagine tim taking care of jay while he’s out of it by doing things like reading to him at night"**

Days of on-and-off fitful rest had Tim drained, both physically and emotionally, but he didn’t dare leave the hotel, not with Jay in this state. Not even to get a refill of his medication, which was beginning to drop to dangerously low levels.

It seemed like Jay was getting better, though, however slowly his recovery was taking. He’d started trying to speak in some of his fleeting moments of wakefulness and even expressed some flickers of lucidity when Tim tried to speak with him. Nothing substantial yet, but it was only a matter of time.

He hoped.

After around the fifth time he was woken up by one of Jay’s fierce coughing fits (at least he wasn’t screaming at some unseen terror this time), Tim knew he would have to do something. He and Jay weren’t getting any sleep, and rest was the only way he could think of that would make his friend better.

He hated this. He hated having to make all the decisions without Jay’s input, he hated seeing his friend like this.

He hated being alone again.

Tim considered giving Jay some of his medication, but he’d quickly pushed that idea into the ‘last resort’ category. He was low enough on the pills as it was. Besides, he didn’t like thinking of having to force Jay to take medication without his explicit consent. Even if Jay agreed to it now,he was hardly in the right state of mind to give his consent to anything. He might not even remember any of this once he woke up proper.

But Tim had to do _something._ Over the course of his entire life, he had become very well-acquainted with the feeling of helplessness. He’d felt it time and time again as he fought against diagnoses, doctors, his own unstable mental state, whatever puppet strings the hooded person was pulling to lead him and Jay along.

And he loathed it.

So the fifth night, he actually got up and sat at the foot of Jay’s bed as the man’s body was racked with harsh coughs. Tim started gently patting his back, like he remembered some of the doctors doing (“To assist the clearing of fluids from the chest cavity,” was what they’d told him, wasn’t it?). The simple motion seemed to ease the violence of the movements a little.

Jay’s eyes fluttered open after the coughing spell faded. He didn’t speak or anything else - just looked at Tim. His expression was impossible to read in the dark.

Tim asked if he was feeling better. Jay’s head tilted a bit and he rolled onto his side.

Asleep?

No, not asleep, a cursory glance  told Tim. Just trying to sleep.

More memories of long nights spent staring at empty hospital walls came crawling back. Tim remembered some of the few nights he’d actually slept relatively peacefully. There had been a nurse there, a not-as-taciturn-or-wary nurse (compared to the others, anyway, who had always seemed to regard him as something to be scared of), who’d occasionally read to him. He still remembered some of the stories.

He looked back at the restless Jay. Would reading - well, _remembering,_ technically, since Tim had no books on him - have any effect at all? Or had it only worked on Tim because at that point in time he’d still had a bit of the idealized mind state of a child?

Tim was out of options. He remembered the first fairy tale the nurse had read to him - Pinocchio, the wooden boy who lied - and, ignoring a pang of guilt, began to tell it to Jay.

He’d gotten as far as the bit with the stormy boat and the whale when he noticed that Jay’s breathing had deepened and his eyes were closed.

Asleep. Finally.

Tim let out a sigh of relief. He was tired, so very tired, but he wanted to stay up and keep watch over Jay a little longer on the off-chance that he woke again before morning. That seemed less likely now, as he seemed to be sleeping more peacefully than he had in a long while.

Tim didn’t know whether to be grateful that the story had worked, or disturbed that he’d just resorted to treating Jay like a mental patient.

It didn’t matter. As long as Jay got through this, as long as Tim got his friend back, he would do whatever it took.


	42. ziptied; brian, jay, tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: **Tim goes to 79 South Creek road and unmasks Hoody. THen jay hops in still Ziptied.**

79 South Creek Road was, as expected, totally silent. Silent and dark.

Wonderful.

Tim crept in. He had the knife and the camera, which he’d turned on out of habit. He wasn’t sure what good Jay’s tiny little knife would be against anything that might be lying in wait, but there wasn’t much he could do about Jay’s awful taste in weaponry.

It didn’t take long before the telltale footsteps of a rapidly approaching someone broke the eerie silence. Tim spun around just in time for the hooded person to crash into him, sending them both sprawling to the ground. The knife and camera flew from Tim’s hands. The two grappled at each other for a few minutes before, almost by accident, a hand snagged at the black stitched mask and yanked it off.

“Oh my - _Brian?”_

But before Tim’s brain could appropriately catch up with what had just happened -

_“Tim!”_

Arms and legs still ziptied, an utterly furious Jay hopped through the open doorway and straight up to Tim (it was worth nothing that Tim was, at this point in time, flat on his back with the frowning mask in hand and the unmasked Brian in the process of trying to reclaim his mask whilst crouched on top of Tim).

Both men went perfectly still, watching in frozen awe as Jay determinedly hopped toward them.

“Jay - ”

“Shut up.”

“Do you realize what this means? _Brian - “_

“I don’t care!”

Jay really looked like he didn’t care. His face was screwed up with rage and, despite how much he was wobbling to retain his balance with his legs bound together, looked like he was about to do some serious damage.

“You tied me up and left me on your living room floor!”

Tim opened his mouth. He honestly had no idea how to respond to this situation’s rapid escalation of ridiculousness.

“Well, it doesn’t look like that stopped you,” he deadpanned.

Jay glowered.

“I want my camera back.”

“Seriously? _That’s_ the reason you came all the way - “

“You guys are hopeless,” Brian said finally. He actually got up off Tim, mask forgotten, and went to leave the room. “If this is the _absolute best you can do,_ it’s no _wonder_ Alex wants you guys dead.”


	43. aggressively hopping; jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> prompt: **Jay aggressively hopping, falling then rolling to 79 south creek.**

It had taken a good hour or to for Jay to figure out how to stand without wobbling while ziptied and another solid thirty minutes for him to learn to take tiny hopping steps without completely losing his balance. But he’d gotten it right in the end.

It looked undignified and it was uncomfortable as hell. Jay didn’t care. He was already out of Tim’s house and down the road. Achingly, painfully slowly, but he was moving. Each agonizing hop brought him closer to 79 South Creek Road.

_And - he - was - going - to - get - to - 79 - South - Creek - Road - if - it - was - the - last - thing - he - did!_

In this thoughts, he punctuated each individual word with a vicious hop until the last one sent him toppling to the ground.

For a second Jay rolled there, spitting up dust and grumbling with frustration. He tried to stand again, but without the help of a nearby wall he could only struggle helplessly against his bonds.

Jay had a few options and he liked none of them. He glared at the sky for a few minutes, hating Tim for doing this to him.

There was no point in stopping now. He would get to 79 South Creek Road even if it killed him.

So he started rolling instead.

It hurt and was even more uncomfortable than hopping and every time he hit a rock he swore loudly and angrily, but at least he was _moving._

Several cars passed. If the drivers saw the ziptied man rolling around on the side of the road, they didn’t show any sign that they cared.

 _When this is over,_ Jay thought darkly as he hit yet another sharp rock. _I’m going to tie Tim to a fucking fence and see how he likes it._


	44. sympathy for the vessel; brian and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Hoody & Tim fluff?**

The other one is gone now, and all that’s left is an unconscious Tim lying on the ground. He’s not very helpful like this, but no matter. He is just a vessel for his twisted other half, the one that is free but obeys without question. His own personality is much less agreeable.

He moves closer to Tim’s prone body. He does not move. The shock of having his own will wrested from him only for it to be dropped back into his body hours later has doubtless left him out cold.

And the seizures. Couldn’t forget those.

He considers leaving Tim where he is. He’s done it before and he could do it again with little to no consequences.

But something gives him pause.

Perhaps he pities Tim. He knows what it’s like, after all, to suffer the agony of coughing fits and seizures and headaches. He knows the feeling of dull helplessness that comes with having one’s mental health be reliant on little more than tiny white pills.

He knows Rosswood better than anywhere. He knows there’s a building nearby, abandoned and crumbling, but it will keep Tim safe until he wakes up.

So he takes him there. He still isn’t entirely sure why; perhaps he really _does_ sympathize with the man, for all of his faults and lies and bitterness and spite.

Because as unpredictable and fierce as his other self is, Tim himself is still very much human. Human, therefore unreliable and untrustworthy and notoriously difficult to control. Humans made mistakes, as he knows all too well, and Tim was no exception.

He leaves Tim in the building. There’s a ragged blanket in one corner and he drapes it over him. Tim will not be grateful for the asbestos dust, but at least he will stay warm until he wakes.

For what it’s worth, he regrets having to get Tim involved in this all over again.


	45. jumpy as hell; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **You like doing dialogue heavy fics? Hm, he's a prompt then. Jay/Tim, dialogue ONLY, with a surprise appearance from someone of your choosing. Do at your leisure, as I'm sure you're currently absolutely swamped with prompts (ayyo that rhymed).**

“Tim?”

“Yeah?”

“How long have we been walking?”

“About thirty minutes.”

“See anything yet?”

“I think I would have said something if I had.”

“Right. Yeah. ‘Course you would have. My mistake.”

“You’re not making this any less nerve-wracking, Jay. _You_ were the one who suggested Rosswood, remember.”

“I know! I just, uh…place is spooky.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Come on, Tim! You of all people should agree with that!”

“I never said I didn’t.”

“Every time we’ve been here something bad has happened.”

“Yeah, well too bad it’s the only lead we have.”

“…what was that?”

“What was what?”

“That! There! There it is again! Don’t you hear it?”

“Very funny, Jay.”

“I’m not joking! Tim, I swear _there is something following us!”_

“I don’t see anything. Are you sure?”

“Do I really need to be? Isn’t the possibility of being followed enough for us to need to get the hell out of here?”

“Shh!”

“Don’t ‘shh’ me! We could _both_ be in - “

 _"Shh!_ I hear it too!”

"…told you.”

“Shut up! Sort of a rustling noise? Footsteps?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, yeah, we’re getting out of here.”

_“Gyahh!”_

“Jay?”

“…yeah, okay. Never mind.”

“Never mind what? What in the hell was that?”

“Me. Um…I was, uh, surprised. But I don’t think we need to worry.”

“Why not?”

“Uhh…’cause _that_ was what was making the noise.”

"A cat? _Seriously,_ Jay?”

"Sorry.”

“All that fuss over a cat?”

“In my defense, it’s a very cute cat.”

“You’re hopeless.”

“Speak for yourself, Mr. _It’s-probably-nothing._ What if it _had_ been something, hmm?”

"Well it’s a good thing it was just a stupid orange cat. Do that again and I will _strangle_ you, I swear.”

"Can we take it with us?”

“Huh?”

“The cat. Can we take it with us?”

“No, Jay.”

“Why not?”

“Hotels usually have a strict ‘no-pets’ policy. Unless you were thinking of keeping it somewhere else?”

“…oh yeah, right.”

“Now let’s go?”

“…fine. But once this is all over, I’m getting us a cat.”


	46. follow; jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **could you maybe do ... jay, as a child, meeting the operator?**

Jay was lost again.

His mom had told him, over and over again, don’t wander off, always hold my hand, don’t go walking any place where you can’t see a trail. But Jay hadn’t wanted to go _far_ \- he just wanted explore the woods a little.

Now he wished he hadn’t. The forest was fine during the day, but once the sun set it got dark and scary. The trees towered over him and all looked the same: bony branches reaching toward him like the claws on some horrible monster.

Jay decided he didn’t like these trees.

Still, he was determined to find his way back home. He would show these trees that he wasn’t scared of them.

Just as the thought crossed his mind, one of their snaking roots grabbed at his ankle and sent him sprawling.

He was still for a minute, the thick, cloying scent of loam and rotting leaves stinging his nostrils. He tried to get up but stopped when a sharp pain stung across his leg.

Jay sat back down to examine his injury. Even in the darkness, he could see the dark smear. He’d skinned his knee.

Tears popped into his eyes. He was going to be stuck here. Forever.

_No._

He tried to push those feelings aside. He was brave. He was going to get home.

A faint whispering coming from the trees instantly dismantled Jay’s resolve. He sat completely rigid on the forest floor, drawing both knees up this chin and hugging them. This had been a bad idea. A bad, _bad_ idea.

The whispering crescendoed. Jay started to shake. He’d been bad. He’d been bad and now something was coming to get him.

Then the forest fell silent.

It was not reassuring. The crickets and frogs and birds and things no longer made their night-sounds. There was only a perfect, eerie quiet that only made Jay tremble harder. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up as a chill ran through him.

_There was something behind him._

Slowly, fearfully, he turned.

Tall dark legs stretched upwards to connect to an impossibly thin, impeccably dressed body. Two willowy arms with no discernible hands to speak of snaked out from a pair of lithe shoulders. But the strangest thing was its face.

Or rather, the fact that it didn’t have one. Where eyes and nose and ears should be, there was only blank skin, unearthly pale, stretched across the thin frame of the thing’s skull.

It was recognizably a man, but not like any man Jay had ever seen.

Its head tilted to one side, a demonstration of childlike curiosity. It reached out one treelike arm toward Jay.

_follow_

Jay stood, brushing twigs and leaves from himself. This thing was strange and odd-looking, but it was promising a way home. And somehow he knew, despite how its unnatural appearance sent shivers through him, it would keep him safe.

He took the hand-that-wasn’t-a-hand and allowed it to lead him through the woods.

—-

The police found the lost child asleep in the edges of the woodland area the next morning, dirty and scuffed but otherwise unhurt.

When asked how he’d gotten out of the woods on his own, the child only looked confused and said he couldn’t remember.


	47. thunder; the masked man and the hooded man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **There is a very heavy thunderstorm and Hoody discovers that Masky actually a little afraid of the sound of it.**

Sometimes it seemed like the universe just plain didn’t want them to succeed. Odds were stacked so steeply against them as it was already, and any advantage open for their taken could be snatched away just as easily.

Okay, maybe he was overreacting about this. But it had been storming for over an _hour_ with no sign of letting up. So he and Tim’s other half had been holed up in the burned-out hospital the entire time, left to pace impatiently about and wait for the rain to stop.

A low rumbling _boom_ of thunder caused them both to jump. He recovered quickly, shaking himself. Just thunder. Nothing special.

But his cohort shrank back against the wall, quailing as the dull roar of thunder echoed across the sky.

He stopped his pacing to stare at them. This was odd. Inconsistent. But it seemed more and more as if…

Were they…

_…afraid?_

That didn’t make much sense. They’d faced unspeakable horrors, too-tall things that stalked them in the forest and hostile, volatile humans who’d pounded their body with rocks and pipes and all sorts of things.

They couldn’t be scared of a little thunder.

…could they?

The next wave of snarling thunder caused them to huddle back into the meager shelter of the wall again and hide their white-masked face in their hands.

He suppressed a sigh. Apparently they could.

Still, there was little else to do until the storm ceased. So he knelt down at his partner’s side and put one black-gloved hand on their shoulder.

They looked up. There was a vague sense of gratefulness lingering in the motion, though the question of emotional experience was always sticky business with them in this form.

Regardless, he patted them hesitantly on the shoulder, hoping he could adequately express some measure of comfort.

It seems he did. They wrapped their arms around him and hugged him close.

This was odd. They had not been designed to know emotion, let alone affection. Perhaps some other things had slipped into that twisted mind in addition to simple impulse and free will.

With no other choice but to wait it out, he hugged them right back.


	48. good dog; rocky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Alex's dog has no idea where its owner is, but its a good dog and every day it waits for him.**

He did not think he had ever done anything wrong but he must have at some point because his human had not come back. Not for a very long time.

But he waited anyway. He waited because that was what good dogs did.

The house had long since been emptied, other tenants come and gone. He cared for none of them, for none of them were his human. He needed his human.

And, more importantly, his human needed him. Who else would keep his human safe and let him know how happy he was to see him every night when he came home, even if he came home late or bloody or sad?

He once considered going after his human but eventually decided against it. He had been told to stay so that was what he would do. He would stay and wait until his human came back.

Because that was what good dogs did.

And he was a good dog.

He had always cared for his human and his human had always cared for him. Even if his human was gone right now, he knew he would come back. He never stopped believing he would. Because he was a good dog, and humans always took care of their good dogs.

He would never stop waiting, even if it took forever (but he knew he wouldn’t, because there was no way his human would make him wait forever - he was a good dog and his human would never abandon his good dog).

So he kept waiting.

He wondered what he’d done wrong to make his human leave.

He had not come back. Not for a very long time.


	49. sentiment; alex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Alex comes back to his dog, except his dog is not there anymore.**

It had been age since he’d returned to his old house but _it had told him to go_ so he did what it said.

Alex Kralie wasn’t really in there anymore. Someone else carried out orders and did what was expected of him and he just sat there waited.

Or perhaps that was what he told himself, over and over again, so he would not have to accept the responsibility of the atrocities he had committed.

He decided to stop thinking about it. Easy enough. He’d trained himself to avoid thinking about it for seven years. He was practically a master now.

He pulled up in front of the old house. Not even so much as a _For Sale_ sign. Odd, but not unheard of. As far as he could tell, the house was empty, waiting for the next tenant to roll in.

Memories of afternoons, full of tapes and friends and pizza and script supervising, sprang unbidden to his mind. He shook them aside, annoyed. Those memories were sentiment, nothing more. No use to him.

Another memory lingered, however.

He was curious.

“Rocky!”

Nothing. No eager barking, no jingling of the bell on his collar as he scampered happily up to his master.

Just silence.

Alex wasn’t surprised, nor was he disappointed. He wandered about the exterior of the house for a bit, wondering what was expected of him. So far, nothing. What had been the point of coming here, then?

He kicked over a patch of dirt. A dull jingling startled him. He knelt down and rooted through the soil until he uncovered the source of the sound.

A filthy half-buried collar, torn and crumbling, with its rusty bell still attached.

Alex picked it up and stared at it bitterly for a minute.

_This was what it wanted._

It wanted him to find it.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he crushed the collar in his palm and dropped its remains to the ground. It was sentiment, nothing more.

And sentiment was useless. He’d learned that lesson with the folded-up picture of Amy and he didn’t need to relearn it now. _It_ should have known that.

Alex could feel its satisfaction as he trudged back to his car and pulled out of the driveway of his old house. He set his jaw grimly. How many sour memories must it stir up before it was confident in him?

_many_

And Alex knew it to be true. It would never be confident in him, not when he wasn’t even confident in himself.


	50. spooked; alex, jay, tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Fanfiction where Alex, Tim, and Jay all play Slender: The Eight Pages.**

“So what is this game, anyway?” Jay asked.

“Called _Slender,”_ Alex informed them as he opened the game file. “Somebody turn off the lights. It’s best played in the dark.”

"Spooky,” Tim said dryly as he flicked the light switch.

The game opened with a simple instruction: _find the 8 pages._ As far as they could tell, they just had to wander around a dark forest with little more than a flashlight to find the eight pages.

Jay just shook his head. He wasn’t drunk enough for this. The thought of being stuck in a dark forest was frightening enough, but the first time he saw the faceless, tall thing that was stalking them, he actually jumped.

“Relax, Jay,” Alex sniggered. “It’s just a game.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” Jay couldn’t explain why the sight of the thing had shaken him so badly, nor could he justify the dread bubbling away in the pit of his stomach.

“I’m gonna, uh…” Jay stood up to leave. He couldn’t think of an adequate excuse, but thankfully Tim and Alex were too wrapped up in the intensity of the game to notice. Jay was able to inch out of the room uninterrupted.

Once he was safely in another room, Jay was able to take a few deep breaths to calm himself down and dispel some of the chills running down his spine.

Why had he become so shaken by the sight of a stupid computer game monster? It had been little more than a tall man wearing a suit with a face that was altogether too pale. Not even remotely creepy out of the context of the game.

So…why?

Jay didn’t know the answer. He didn’t care to find out, either. He didn’t want to chicken out in front of his friends, but he didn’t think he could stomach the sight of the thing a second time.

Yeah. He would be going home early tonight. Jay steeled himself to reenter the room with his friends, running through a list of plausible excuses to use. He thought of the dark, lonely drive home and tried to ignore the faint surge of fear that followed.


	51. little paws; jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **jay buys a kitten to keep him company in the hotel room**

He didn’t have the money to spare and this hotel had a strict ‘no-pets’ policy but Jay didn’t care. He’d been moving from hotel to hotel every night since he and Tim had angrily parted ways. He’d become so used to having company in the hotel rooms that every minute passed sitting there, nothing to do or say to anyone, was unbearable.

Jay was lonely.

Really, that was nothing new. As long as he could remember, even before all _this,_ he’d been lonely. Friends would only call you so many times before realizing your quiet refusals of their invitations of hey, how about a movie, were signs of your crippling introversion and there was really no point in asking you to go anywhere. And it’s not like Jay had ever had an overabundance of friends anyway. He could count the number of people he’d last been on a first-name basis with on one hand.

So Jay bought a kitten.

It was stupid, he knew it. There was no way he could take care of it and he’d inevitably have to return it in the morning along with a heartfelt apology. Still, for one night, it actually felt pretty nice to have the company, even if it meant that Jay would have to sleep in his car for the next couple of weeks until he could scrounge up enough money to spend the night in the next crummy motel.

The kitten was black, save for its white paws, chest, and stomach. It wandered around his room, mewing imperiously. Jay watched it, feeling almost content for a few minutes. He even filmed the kitten a bit, though he couldn’t really say way. It wasn’t like he had anyone to show the footage to. Maybe he just wanted to preserve the memory of being _almost happy_ for the first time in…

…well, in years.

Then he remembered that he was still running from everything that had happened, that Alex Kralie was after his blood (and possibly Tim as well), and a million other things and he put his head in his hands.

He returned the kitten to the pet store the next morning and drove out of town without looking back.


	52. broken; jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Jay breaks his camera and can't fix it or get another one.**

_No._

_no nonononon no no no nono this could not be happening._

This could not not _not **not**_ be happening.

Hit the thing, strike it with the center of the palm, maybe it’ll work, maybe it’ll fizzle to life with a faintly apologetic whiz. Maybe the screen is just not capturing.

Charge it. _charge it charge it again and again again_

Nothing, still nothing _no_

_we need it_

_but it’s not working_

Open all hatches, flip all switches, stab fingers at every button, something will work, something has _got_ to work

but nothing

_nothing nothing nothing **no**_

**_we need it_ **

work, damn you!

fling it against the wall in a fit of rage and despair, immediately regret the decision, try to piece it back together and fall to pieces yourself

it’s your safeguard, an extension of yourself

your arms, your hands, they don’t feel right without the familiar weight of the camera and now _it is gone **no**_

you are

alone

_no_

isolated

_no_

_vulnerable_

_**no** _

it will come for you and laugh because you can no longer look at it through a lens but will have to stare at it face-to-faceless-face and accept its existence even though its very being is _wrong_ in every sense of reality

_no no no not this **never this**_

cover ears, cover eyes, scream and pretend you can’t hear it

but it’s there

it’s

_found you_


	53. irrelevant; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **How about Jay completely loses it, turns into a proxy, and ends up hurting Tim**

mind hurt, pain hurt, everything hurt you feel you’re losing yourself everything slipping away _no please_ and the name ‘Jay’ lingers for half a second before _it is gone **no** and - _

_and -_

_**there** _

_**see him?** _

yes. you see him and you remember you knew him once upon a time. maybe you were friends.

no, you were never friends.

he smokes

that reminds you of -

_something **-  
**_

\- nothing

_irrelevant irrelevant irrelevant_

_**take care** _

_**of him** _

creep up behind him, don’t make a sound, wonder why he smokes and why he is sad -

_irrelevant irrelevant irrelevant_

_**get rid** _

_**of him** _

charge him, coming at him from behind, loop one arm under his chin, tighten. choke, choke, down he goes on one knee, your weight pulling him down

no, he drops down and you sail over his head, land on your back _hurt -_

he strikes you in the face, once, twice, but you block the third blow and grab his throat and _tighten_ again and he locks his fists together and brings both of them down on your stomach _hurt -_

_curse this feeble human body need breath need breath need **breathe**_

breathe, gasp, roll out of the way. back on your feet soldier, work’s not yet done

wrestle him _Tim that is his name how do you know this_ to the ground, pin him _Tim hey that rhymes_ down and hit hit hit

again again again

_follow_

_orders_

until his face is bloody and his eyes are shut and he may be breathing but perhaps no

_why do you feel so sad_

_irrelevant irrelevant_

_do as you’re told_

stand up, soldier, sentiment is not your tool

walk away and leave your enemy to rest


	54. third friday of every month; alex and amy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **alex finds amy.**

It was the third Friday of the month, which meant Amy had a wave of nostalgia and a bittersweet stroll down memory lane scheduled for the night. The third Friday of every month used to be her and Alex’s meeting day, back before he moved in with her. And even after they’d started living together, they’d still made sure to do something special that day. Every month.

Now it was just a reminder of how quickly he’d been gone from her life.

Yeah, okay, she missed him. Amy would never deny that. It had been, what, three years since she’d last seen him? She’d lost count. It had been that long.

That little realization hurt.

She considered doing something tonight to commemorate…what, exactly? The fact that she hadn’t seen her errant boyfriend for over three years? The fact that there was only total radio silence at his end, that she didn’t know how he was, what he was even doing?

What exactly did Amy have to celebrate?

The answer was nothing, of course, as it had been for the past three years. But she still wanted to do… _something._

Or nothing.

One of the two.

And, of course, she settled for the latter.

It had just started to get dark when Amy heard a knock on the door. Her curiosity was piqued, but a faint hope tingled in the back of her mind. It was the third Friday of the month. If anyone knew what that date meant to her…

_Or it could just be coincidence, which is the most likely option._

Best not get her own hopes up.

Hesitantly, Amy opened the door.

It took a while for her eyes to adjust to the inky dark of outside. But she recognized him immediately once they did, despite the bruises and scrapes, his rough, unshaven face, and torn, muddied clothing.

_Alex - ?_

“Amy,” he whispered hoarsely. He looked so tired, so worn, and he almost fell into her arms as he stumbled forward. She barely managed to catch him. 

“Alex! Oh my - are you okay?”

He was unkempt and pale, looking like he’d spent the past three years in hell, but he smiled.

“Found you.” He closed his eyes with relief and hugged her tight. “Found you.”


	55. medicated nightmares; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **could you write a thingy based on entrry 69 where tim and jay are on the road and tim is driving while jay is sleeping over the backseats? tim realizes hes running low on medication and jay is having uneasy dreams about tim attacking him agian.**

Jay had long since crashed in the backseat, leaving Tim to try (and fail) to ignore his fitful mumbling and twitching. Tim was no stranger to having his sleep plagued by nightmares - he could not for the life of him recall when he had last had a full night’s rest - but Jay’s frequent agitated mutters were making it hard for Tim to focus. It was difficult enough to navigate the barren stretches of road in the dark.

Tim checked the clock on his dashboard a little anxiously. He should have pulled over to take one of his pills thirty minutes ago. He tightened his grip on the wheel, glancing at his hands. They weren’t shaking and he didn’t feel any of the warning signs yet. Still, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kick in sooner or later. Experience had quickly taught him that it was far more likely to be sooner.

He pulled over to the side of the road, stepping out of the car to breathe in the blessedly cool night air. Tim fleetingly considered a coffee stop, but quickly dismissed the idea. He was jittery enough without the help of caffeine, and there was no reason to make himself even more anxious. His life was brimful of tension as it was.

There was no delaying the inevitable. Tim shook out one of the precious white capsules from his bottle of medication, noting with some dismay that the bottle was getting dangerously low. He shot a furtive glance at Jay, still passed out in the backseat. Jay would want to know if Tim was running low on the stuff that kept them working safely together.

Tim tried to imagine Jay’s reaction to hearing that he was almost out of medication. The furrowed brow would deepen, the look of perpetual worry on his friend’s face would intermix with outright fear.

_No._

Tim didn’t want to trouble his friend further. He’d work out this issue on his own - he had in the past, after all.

He dry-swallowed the pill without difficulty and climbed back into the driver’s seat, resuming his scanning of the horizon for a hotel.

—-

_“tim?”_

_tim did not look like tim. he was not acting like tim, either. instead he charged at jay, face frozen in an expression of horrible indifference, fingers snaking up to grab jay’s throat_

_“tim, stop!”_

_the fingers tightened. jay choked, struggling against their grip. he was starting to get dizzy. his own fingers scrabbled uselessly against the back of tim’s hands, which were now looking pale, bony, and dreadfully thin._

_jay looked up, and tim was no longer tim, but that **thing** , the thing-with-no-face that now had jay trapped in its grasp_.

_jay screamed._

And woke up.

“Hey, you all right?” Tim asked from the front seat.

“Huh?” Jay was breathless, heart palpitating far too rapidly _,_ actually _sweating._

“You all right?” Tim repeated. He sounded worried.

“Yeah. Uh, fine.” Jay shook himself and raised a hand to smack his forehand with an open palm. It had been a dream. A stupid, _stupid_ dream.

“You get any sleep?”

“What?”

“I said, you get any sleep?”

“Yeah. Yeah, a, a bit.” The lie tasted sour on Jay’s tongue, and he was certain Tim could tell.

“Good, cause I can’t find a hotel. We might have to crash in the car again.”

“Yippee,” Jay muttered sarcastically, climbing into the passenger’s seat. “How are you doing? Want me to take over?”

“I’m fine.” Tim wasn’t any better at lying than Jay was. The dark circles under his eyes had grown deeper and his hands were shifting restlessly on the wheel, a sure sign that he was trying to keep himself awake.

“Sure you are. Pull over and I’ll take next leg.”

Tim didn’t argue. He rubbed one hand over his eyes as he stopped the car and stumbled out of the driver’s seat.

“Try and get some sleep, all right?” Jay asked, taking Tim’s place at the wheel.

“I doubt I’ll get any more than you did,” grumbled Tim in reply, but he was out like a light as soon as they were moving again.

Jay’s nightmare still lingered. He tried his best to ignore the memories of Tim running toward him, face devoid of expression. That would never happen, not while Tim had the pills. He and Jay were watching out for each other now.

But it didn’t matter how often Jay told himself that, over and over, until it became a sort of mantra, almost a prayer. The thought that Tim was only a few pills away from turning into that _other person_ that would have no qualms with pinning Jay to the ground whilst strangling him persisted.

 _But that won’t happen,_ Jay reminded himself sternly. _Tim said it would never happen again. He promised._

And Tim wouldn’t lie, not about this.

Because that would just be ridiculous.


	56. truth or dare; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **truth or dare. jam?**

“Come on, just this once. Let’s do it.”

Tim scowled. “What are you, twelve?”

“I’m _bored._ This is the millionth hotel we’ve been in and there’s no way we’re getting sleep tonight anyway. Come on. Please?”

"Fine,” huffed Tim, but Jay could have sworn he was trying to hide a smile. “Truth or dare?”

Jay fidgeted for a bit before - “Um. Truth.”

“Aw, what, you scared?”

“Truth!”

“Fine. Uhh…” Tim considered the question. Damn, this was harder than he thought. “Okay, uh, first kiss?”

 _“Really?_ That’s the _best_ you could come up with?”

"First kiss!”

“Um. Dare.”

“You can’t switch halfway through, cheater.”

“Who says? Dare.”

“Fine.” Tim actually _grinned,_ and on a scale from 1 to the Joker he must have scored a solid Cheshire Cat.

Jay swallowed nervously. This had _definitely_ been a mistake.


	57. this wasn't supposed to happen; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Masky and Tim sort of come to terms with each other and decide to work together because Masky points out he could've saved Jay (as he did last time when Alex did the gun thing) and Tim can't really argue with that because he sees his point**

You watch the footage again and again. Maybe you’ll stop feeling numb the twenty-third time you see it.

_Nope. Still numb._

Twenty-four, then.

_This wasn’t supposed to happen._

**_This wasn’t supposed to happen._ **

**_THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN._ **

And now you don’t know what to do.

In fact, now you’re shaking. You’re numb and prickly all over and oh _no -_

But _they_ don’t take you, wrest control from you like they usually do. They’re there and they’re hissing in the back of your skull and it’s terribly distracting, but at least they’re not making you _do things_ and forcing your body to seize up and _hurt._

_-he has to die-_

Alex? Yeah. Alex has to die. That was pretty much the plan from day one. Not that you would ever tell Jay, really.

But now -

_No._

_We’re not thinking about that._

_-he has to die-_

Yes, but you already damn well _know_ that, don’t you?

_-we know how to do it-_

Yeah, and so do you.

_-he can’t take both of us-_

_-not both at once-_

And maybe a few days ago you would have dismissed this idea with some fresh pills. Choke your other self down, stifle them, force them out of your head for a little while. Because what use could they possibly be?

_-we’re stronger-_

And you know that’s true.

 _We_ know that’s true.

_-we saved him before-_

Him? Who him?

Oh. _Oh._

_We’re not thinking about him._

_-then don’t-_

_-think about **him** -_

Alex. Yeah. We’ll think about Alex. Our vision darkens and we get cold and shivery because, quite honestly, we don’t think we’ve ever found someone we’ve hated so much.

Not even _the_ _tall thing we don’t talk about_ because even though it took him, it didn’t shoot the bullet that ended him.

Not even ourselves, because at least _we_ didn’t take our last friend away.

_But it’s still our fault, because we left him. We left him there, alone._

_He died alone._

But _we’re not thinking about him._ We need to think about Alex.

Alex.

We’re going to kill him for what he did.

_He has a gun. We don’t._

_-we’re faster-_

Yeah, we are, aren’t we?

Sanity be damned, because we’ve lost the him, our only _anchor,_ and _we should have been there_  and _it’s all our fault._

No. It’s _Alex’s_ fault.

And for once, we actually agree on something.


	58. help; tim and brian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Okay then. How about some MH Tim/Brian? I'm not good with prompts, so maybe something feely or fulffy? couple or just as friends is up to you really ^u^**

Tim is not having a good day.

Not that he’s actually _said_ so, but Brian can tell because Tim’s face has gotten pale and he’s visibly shaking as he stands up, having just barely made it through classes today, and practically whips out the door and down the hall to the nearest bathroom.

Brian grabs his bag - tonight’s reading be damned, his friend needs him - and hastily follows.

He enters the bathroom just in time to see Tim’s trembling hands lose their grip on his pill bottle. The cap flicks off and sends half the pills cascading to the floor.

Not good.

 _“Fuck!”_ Tim snarls, and Brian can see the way his jaw is working and how his body is shuddering with barely suppressed coughs and _no no this is very not good._

Brian grabs Tim’s wrist before it can jerk and cause him to lose more pills. Tim looks at him anxiously.

“I can’t - ”

Brian wordlessly takes the pill bottle, pours out two of the precious white capsules, and hands them back. Tim dry-swallows them and chases them with a couple quick splashes of water to the face.

Then Tim backs away from the sink, fists still clenched too tight and shoulders still too rigid. He backs up and stumbles as he hits the opposite wall of the bathroom and then, legs wobbling too much to support him, slides down to sit against it.

Brian sits beside him. He doesn’t say anything, just waits for the shivers and chattering teeth and fearful look to die down.

Tim stares at his arms and the row of faint scars and doesn’t say anything either. The silence stretches thin until finally Brian can tell Tim just wants something, anything, to distract him.

So Brian speaks:

“It’s happening again, huh?”

Tim nods.

“Yeah.”

Brian nods too. He doesn’t know what else to say.

Luckily Tim doesn’t seem to care. He’s just glad that Brian is _there._

Because Brian doesn’t stare at him or the pills or ask why he has those weird seizure thingies or if he’s cold or nervous or _does he need a drink of water_ or _is he drunk or something_ or grip him by the shoulders and start panicking.

Brian doesn’t do any of those things. He doesn’t really know what the pills are for, or even what’s really going on behind Tim’s thick medical file, so thick that he’s been pretty much mandated to go to the health office and meet with a psychiatrist once a week.

Brian doesn’t care.

Tim’s glad that he doesn’t ask if he’ll be all right.

(Because of course he won’t.)

He doesn’t ask what’s going on with those pills and seizures or what’s _wrong_ with him.

(Because it doesn’t matter.)

No, they just sit against the wall of the bathroom together and don’t say anything.

(Because what could they possibly say to alleviate the strangeness of their lives - )

((Well, Tim’s life, really.))

((Brian just got caught up in it.))

Eventually Tim gets up and picks up all the pills and throws them out, making a disgusted noise in the back of his throat. Brian stands too, and helps.

Sometimes Tim wonders how he was lucky enough to get a friend like Brian. Brian who doesn’t ask any uncomfortable questions, who approached confused and lost Timothy W. on his first day of courses and introduced himself, confidently and easily, and stuck by his side the whole day as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Brian who doesn’t question why Tim shows up on his doorstep at 2 AM, shivering and with no idea how he got there, but simply invites him in and warms some fresh coffee.

And Tim wonders what he could have possibly done to deserve this friend. His _only_ friend, who could very easily be the most popular guy in the university, but chose to stay with this _loner_ _, outcast, fucking **freak**_.

Brian turns to Tim and inclines his head at the door.

“Wanna get lunch?”

Tim shrugs.

It doesn’t matter why Brian chose _Tim,_ of all people, but Tim is glad that he did. And he wouldn’t trade this friend for anything.

“Yeah, okay.”

He follows Brian out.


	59. raised you from perdition; tim and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Okay so a couple nights ago in the MH Skype chat Jay and I got to talking about raven!Tim and if he was an spn angel who saves Jay and it was so exciting that Jay sent me this prompt and I’ve been wracking my brains on how to go about writing this cause it’s so exciting but also so so different.**
> 
> Needless to say, this will diverge from canon. Like. A _lot._ In fact, don’t even try to relate it to canon. It’s sort of like a post-#80 AU? Kind of?

There’s pain tearing at your side and -

_Why can’t you remember -_

There’s something _important_ you need to just  _remember -_

Something about a camera - ?

A _name,_ there was an important _name -_

_Fuck this hurts_

Someone’s screaming

_It’s you_

But somehow this is all you can remember -

_was there anything before this?_

_there had to be, didn’t there?_

You manage to be irritated through the burning in your guts - because you can’t _remember_ and it’s at the _tip of your tongue_ but everything’s just too _slow -_ _  
_

_no, too fast -  
_

_there are words you should know, important words, but you can’t remember any of them -_

But then there’s something _pulling_ at you, something that isn’t pain and isn’t horrifically damaged memory so _what is it?_

There’s rushing, then light, then silence.

—-

When you wake, the first thing you do is inhale a mouthful of asbestos dust and start coughing uncontrollably. You try to get up but can only manage to drag yourself onto all fours. Your body is shaking, too much for you to stand. You ache all over, but your shoulder in particular sends out more angry hums of pain than the rest of you.

_Camera._

It’s lying beside you and you grab it. You’re dizzy and your stomach feels like it’s about to collapse in on itself. Are you hungry or just nauseous?

 _Oh._ No. Definitely the latter.

When the dry heaves have passed, you roll over and lie on your back. You stare at the nondescript ceiling of whatever anonymous abandoned building you’re in. Your heart is still racing, mind is still a wildly unorganized mess (between the pounding throbs of the headache, anyway), and how the holy _hell_ are you supposed to keep track of all of this?

What _happened_ to you?

You remember the word _‘benedict’_ but its significance is lost on you, at least for the time being. And then that… _thing,_ tall and face-that-wasn’t-a-face and

            it  
                      was  
         an  
                               impossible  
                 shape

It’s too much for your tired brain to conceive of presently. But the exercise in visualizing the impossible shakes a dusty _something_ in the back of your mind, and it all comes trickling back -

_Alex -_

_gun -_

_Benedict Hall -_

_find the ark -_

Your skull starts aching even more and you grip it with both hands, rising to a sitting position. Everything makes sense in a vague, obscure sort of way, in the way that means that it made complete sense at _some_ indistinct point in your life and right now it’s just all jumbled up together.

But sitting here trying to work it all out won’t do much good now, you tell yourself firmly. Even if your legs still feel wobbly and standing makes you feel viciously lightheaded, you grip the sides of the walls and start navigating out of the building.

Alex might still be lurking about. And that… _thing_ that sent you to, well… _wherever you went._

_Hell?_

It certainly had felt like it.

You shudder as the far-too-recent memory prickles at your temples. That sensation of complete _loss,_ your thoughts consistently at the tip of your tongue but always just out of reach, was more terrifying than anything you’ve experienced thus far.

And that’s saying something.

You make it into the daylight - _it’s daytime?_ \- and stand there, blinking as your eyes adjust. The transition from the myriad of hellish colors, steeped in darkness, to the drab grays and browns of the building’s interior had been harsh enough, but now your retinas are being flooded with brightness and warmth and it’s almost too much. You have to raise a hand to block out the light and screw your eyes shut and shrink back against the wall just to keep your headache from worsening.

_But how did you get out?_

That confused thought won’t stop wriggling away in your head. You remember the clear sensation of being _pulled,_ gradually, out of _that place._

Something _did_ that.

_But what?_

Your headache won’t stop persisting. You wish there was some way to know for sure, any way -

_Camera._

You’re furious that it took you this long to remember it. You scramble to turn it on.

The screen flickers once and goes out.

Your heart plummets.

It won’t work. No combination of tapping buttons or shaking the damn thing garner a response. Either the battery is dead or the camera is too damaged to play back.

Both scenarios are equally frustrating.

In your utter frustration, you stand up and wind your arm back, preparing to fling your camera, your only trusted companion, against the ground and break it, shatter it beyond repair.

“I wouldn’t.”

You jump and stumble backwards, bracing yourself against the wall. You didn’t even _notice_ him.

“Who - ”

“I’m the one who got you out.” The other man _looks_ normal enough, though admittedly pretty haggard with a couple days’ worth of stubble. Red plaid shirt, worn jeans, hands in pockets.

But still, there’s something… _off_ about him. Not in the way that that tall dark slip of a thing sends shivers down your spine, but in a way that makes the air tingle with some sort of abstract energy.

Maybe its his eyes. They don’t look nearly young enough for someone who looks to be around your age. Physically, anyway.

“Uh.” You’re aware that you’re staring, but you can’t really tear your eyes away. You swallow hard, and the action stings your parched throat. “Th-thanks?”

The other man shrugs. He looks uncomfortable, though perhaps not un-confident.

“Who are you?” you reiterate, in full this time.

Another shrug.

“An angel.” A bitter smirk tugs at one side of his mouth. He looks like he _could_ be joking, but -

“No, really,” you persist.

“No, _really.”_ His gaze snaps back to meet yours and it darkens, the smile gone.

He’s serious.

You try to back up against the wall but you’re already pressed flat and oh _fuck_ there’s nowhere to run.

He doesn’t quite _stalk_ up to you - the movement isn’t predatory, per se - but he almost _glides_ as he approaches. He does not blink or shift his eyes from yours. It’s like he’s _reading_ you somehow, and the thought does not comfort you in the least.

He stops a few paces from your position. You try not to show how thoroughly out of your depth you feel, but he probably can tell anyway.

“In the common sense of the word,” he growls. “An angel, yeah. You were lost, and I found you. Pulled you out. You can check.”

He points at your shoulder. The shoulder that’s been throbbing like mad since you awoke in the building, whose pain only intensifies as he gestures at it. You hiss in pain as you pull up your sleeve and expose a raw-red handprint.

The other man raises his hand so you can compare.

“How did - ” Fuck, you’re shaking again. “Was I - was I in _hell?”_

"Almost,” he replies cryptically. And as he steps back you catch a shimmer of _something_ in the corner of your eye, something that _could not should not can’t possibly exist but holy shit -_

The other man’s head whips around to glare at you, and in an instant the sky darkens and there’s a bright blaze of light and for one incredible, unfathomable second you can glimpse the silhouette of colossal wings, inky black and spread wide, and a hard glint of an otherworldly blue burning away in his eyes.

Then the light fades. The sky returns to normal. When you blink to adjust your eyes, the imprint of the wings is seared into your eyelids.

“Oh.”

That’s all you can make out just now, because _holy fuck._

_Holy._

_Fuck._

He’s an angel.

“Yeah,” he says. “I am.”

Before you can wonder if you even said that out loud, he points at the camera hanging limp in one hand.

“Sorry about that.” He actually looks contrite as he says it. “Electronics don’t exactly respond well to my true form.”

“Y-your true form,” you stammer lightly. “Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah. And since, uh, you’re an _angel_ and all - ” That thought still feels alien and weird and you try not to dwell on it. ” - Do you maybe, uh, have a name or anything?”

There’s a flash of uncertainty in his expression as he nods. Slowly.

"Yeah, okay.” He considers one of his hands for a minute, studying the precise movement of his fingers as he flexes each joint accordingly, and for a second you wonder if you’re going to need to ask again.

Finally he looks back up to make eye contact.

“Tim,” he says finally. “You can call me that.”

You nod. Okay. _Tim._ Somehow you were expecting something with a little more gravitas, maybe, but this name is short and to the point and works.

“Well, Tim,” you mumble. “Uh. Thanks.”

Tim doesn’t seem to know how to respond to your gratitude, so he just nods awkwardly and crosses his arms.

The silence pervades for far too long before you can muster the courage to speak up again.

“Uh, Tim?”

“Yeah.” He quickly unfolds his arms and his body coils up a little, like he’s expecting the worst.

“Can we get something to eat?”


	60. good intentions; tim and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **How about fluffy RavenTim and BlueJay fic?**

It’s only three in the morning when Tim’s woken up by the familiar glow of Jay’s laptop.

(Tim wonders when he started categorizing 3 AM as an “only” time.)

“Jay?” Tim mumbles sleepily, and Jay jumps a little in his chair and looks at his friend guiltily. His blue-and-cream wings twitch a bit, as if to shield Tim from the glare of the monitor.

Tim rolls out of the _far_ -too-bumpy hotel bed, scrubbing one hand over his eyes. Again, Jay’s wings give a little spasm, and Tim knows he is just barely refraining from blocking the laptop screen from Tim’s vision. And it only takes one glance at the offending monitor to tell Tim why.

“The entries again?”

Jay actually _droops._ He bows his head, his shoulders slump, he crosses arms and curls into his chest. The wings fold.

“You gotta stop doing this to yourself, buddy.” Tim sits cross-legged on the floor beside Jay’s desk chair. “None of this was your fault, okay?”

“That’s not what you said before.” Jay sounds bitter.

Ah, the familiar bite of resentment. Coupled, of course, with Jay’s usual side order of self-loathing. Tim resists the urge to let out an exasperated sigh. Of _course_ Jay chooses tonight to drown in his own nostalgia.

And of _course_ he chooses - yet again - to blame everything on himself, because logic and rational thinking be damned.

Tim reaches up hesitantly to comfort his friend. It takes a good two minutes for him to muster the courage to complete the action and start gently stroking the ridge of Jay’s nearest wing. For a moment the other man tautens, tension evident in the stiffness of his wings.

He sits, rigid and looking as though he doesn’t quite know how to react, for several more minutes. Tim continues to gently run his fingers through the other man’s wings in what he dearly hopes is a soothing gesture.

Apparently it works, because eventually Jay relaxes.

The laptop monitor casts everything in a clinical blue glow, but Tim can still glimpse the black-and-cream patterns dotting his friend’s blue wings, slender and narrow like the man who bore them. Tim has always been self-conscious about his own wings, which to him seemed ugly and cumbersome - they were raven’s wings, all black and blocky and unwieldy and feeling far too large. Though with all the running and hiding in the shadows the two of them had been forced to do as of late, Tim’s inky black wings turned out to have their own practical purpose. 

A pity they can’t just _shake some damn sense_ into Jay.

Tim studies the entry Jay had been watching. He doesn’t know which number it is, but he recognizes Alex’s face - cold and angry and nothing like the smirking pretentious filmmaker Tim dimly remembers attending college with him.

“You know I’m right though?” Tim says, scooting closer so he can lean his head on Jay’s leg.

 _(What? I’m tired,_ Tim tells himself.)

“Right?” Jay looks down, frowning.

“About this not being your fault.”

Jay’s mouth tightens but he doesn’t answer.

“Look, you were just trying to help. That’s all you ever wanted to do. Right?”

Jay shrugs helplessly. “I…I guess so.”

“So listen,” Tim says firmly, and Jay looks back down. “Even if, yeah, you coming back and pointing cameras in everyone’s faces just stirred up a bunch of crap no one was ready ever for and opened up old wounds and - ”

“Is this talk supposed to be helping?” Jay asks weakly.

“Shut up, I was getting there.” One of Tim’s wings nips out to nudge Jay’s playfully, and this time the other man doesn’t stiffen from the rare physical contact. “No matter what happened ‘cause of all this, your intentions were good. And that’s what matters. Okay?”

“Yeah,” mutters Jay, sarcasm dripping from every feather. “'Cause if it turns out that Jessica’s really just… _gone,_ it’s all okay cause, hey, _at least_ _I didn’t mean to.”_

Tim pushes aside the pang of guilt that comes with the mention of Jessica’s name.

_Not now._

“You’re doing what you can with the cards you were dealt. That’s all anyone can ask you to do.” Tim’s hand sneaks out from Jay’s plumage and curls around the other man’s hand. “Now do I need to drag you back to sleep or can you manage on your own?”

“Yes, _mother.”_ Jay grumbles as he closes his laptop, but the furrow of worry and regret in his brow is gone and the complaints are good-natured. His wings fold up this time as he lays down and rolls onto his side. Tim is so used to seeing Jay crashed out in the horrible hotel beds, hat askew, wings splayed, and fingers still balanced on his laptop’s keyboard.

Tim smiles as he folds his own wings and lays down. He hopes Jay sleeps in till noon - the poor guy looks like he really needs it.


	61. strategic use of shadows; tim and jay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Maybe go off the wingfic a little where Tim uses his wings to hide Jay and himself from Alex, Hoodie, whoever. ...A tad appreciative of his wings for once?**

If one had told Tim two hours ago that tonight he would have Jay pressed against the wall of an abandoned hospital with their faces inches apart, he would have said they were lying.

 _“Is he still there?”_ Jay whispers.

 _“Shh!”_ hisses Tim, and Jay falls silent.

The two of them look utterly ridiculous, huddled against the hospital wall, trying and failing to make strategic use of the shadows as the echo of approaching footsteps sends tiny thrills of fear down their spines. They don’t know who it is looking for them, but past experience in this place indicates that it can’t be anyone good.

Of course, once said searcher turns the corner and sees Tim and Jay valiantly trying to flatten themselves against the wall, there won’t be much point in hiding anymore.

The footsteps grow closer. Tim can feel his heartrate increase to a pace that is probably unhealthy.

It’s these damn _wings_ always getting in the way, he grumbles inwardly as he tries to shift to make room for the cumbersome things. They’re big and bulky and they’re not even _pretty_ like Jay’s, just boring old _black -_

_Black._

_Tim’s wings are **black.**_

“Oh, you _idiot!”_ Tim growls to himself, because of _course._

_“Shh!”_

“Hold still!”

Tim turns around so he’s almost nose-to-nose with Jay and carefully spreads his wings, reaching with the tips until he and Jay are practically cocooned against the wall, the raven’s feathers seamlessly blending in with the abandoned hospital’s darkened interior.

 _Now let’s just hope they didn’t bring a flashlight,_ Tim prays.

 _“Ohh,”_ Jay murmurs, and Tim can tell that he understands what’s happened. “That’s…actually pretty smart.”

 _“Actually?”_ Tim glares. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

_“Shh!”_

Tim subsides, disgruntled, but he can’t help but feel the tiniest glow of pride that the wings he’s always resented have finally proved to be useful.


	62. something off; tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Tim discovering the Youtube channel**

Jay has always been a _jumpy_ one, Tim knows that. Still, his reaction to the unassuming guy in the hoodie had been, well… _weird._

As far as descriptors went, “weird” pretty much covered the entire trip to the old hospital pretty well, from Jay’s insistence on using the hated building to the general air of nervousness the man put off.

 _But Jay’s always been a nervous guy,_ Tim tells himself firmly. Give it a rest. It doesn’t matter. In a couple days he’ll doubtless drift away from this town and into the next and take his camera and tapes and weird shifty side-glances with him. He can film Alex Kralie’s old thing somewhere else, Tim decides.

 _Marble Hornets._ The thought of Alex’s latest pretentious project makes Tim shake his head in amused despair. The little film had been doomed from the start, especially considering, well…had any of them _read_ the script? Tim had refrained from saying anything because it was easily the largest group of people he’d gotten along with for any extended amount of time, but that was in the past and Tim hadn’t heard from any of them in _years._

_Maybe that’s for the best._

Throughout the entire rest of the day, though, it _nags_ at him. He might be over-thinking things, but for some reason chasing a guy in a hoodie through an abandoned hospital doesn’t land very high on the list of things Tim feels someone directing a student film would be up to.

And Tim doesn’t have work all day and he’s just so _bored_ and before he knows it he’s doing an Internet search for “Marble Hornets” out of a mixture of boredom, suspicion, and curiosity. And he ends up on the _MarbleHornets_ YouTube channel, with almost 60 “entries” to date.

There’s an awful clenching in the pit of his stomach that, on any other day, would mean Tim would slam his laptop shut and go aggressively think about something else for a few hours, but -

_\- Jay had been acting so damn **shifty** earlier - _

And Tim’s mind is made up.

The first few entries are old tapes, some he recognizes and some he doesn’t. But it’s not the old footage of him and Brian flubbing their lines that intrigues him - it’s that… _person_ in the background.

The one that’s impossibly tall and thin and looks to be wearing a suit but it’s _face is just -_

And Tim’s memories are full of sick nights and coughing and screaming and pounding on the walls of a windowless room, and him howling for the doctors to _let him out it’s after him -_

And the urge to fling the laptop across the room is almost overpowering and _oh shit no_ Tim’s hands are getting shaky and his eyelids are prickly _no no_

Two pills and a bottle of water later, Tim is still watching the entries with a sort of grim fascination. The introduction of the masked man sends tingles of a very unwelcome familiarity through him, but he can’t place _why_ until Entry #35.

The rest of the entries pass by in a blur of horrified realizations and the feeling of betrayal only increases with each passing hour.

Tim doesn’t know which revelation is harder to process - that his old childhood nightmare is _very much a reality_ , that this impossible “just-a-hallucination” has set off an entire chain reaction of events that all seem to lead back to _Tim,_ or that in said events, it turns out that _Tim has been the antagonist._

He’s trembling again, isn’t he?

_How exactly does one process this?_

Tim tries to sit down but he stands up two seconds later to start pacing around the room and his mind and heart are both racing and he really just needs to blame something, _hit_ something.

Tim stops pacing.

_Jay._

_He did this._

He came into Tim’s life with his camera and his _lies_ about Alex and stupid fucking student films. He _brought_ this thing back to Tim, this old _nightmare_ that Tim has spent so much time telling himself was just a hallucination that he began to believe it.

_Jay did this._

Tim is still shaking when he dials Jay’s number and he doesn’t even recognize his voice, calm and measured and not even a little bit shaky, as he says _he needs to_ _tell him something._

And once the call is finished Tim throws his phone onto the couch and stands in the middle of the room and shuts his eyes and tries to focus on something else to keep his surroundings from spinning -

\- because his whole life has been made of trying to _forget_ and _ignore_ and pushing his past _away_ and now Jay has dragged these unwanted memories back into his life as effortlessly and cluelessly as you please -

\- and Tim thinks about the _other him_ lurking in the back of his mind and how this explains _so much_ about lost time and waking up with blood all over his face but at the same time Tim feels…tainted, dirty, needs to claw this intruder out of his head.

_Push it down, pretend it isn’t happening._

It’s worked before, hasn’t it?

Or was Tim just fooling himself before?

Tim’s eyes snap open and his grip tightens on his car keys as he heads out to meet Jay.

He’s going to _kill_ him.


	63. yesterday's coffee; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Jay and Tim are living together after they escape the Operator. Happyish please!**

You don’t remember what you had been dreaming about, but it must have been something along the lines of _nightmare_ because your legs wobble as you stumble to the bathroom to wash the cold sweat from your face and neck.

It’s only 4 in the morning but you doubt you could get back to sleep now, not while your arms and legs still feel like jelly and your stomach is twisting horribly, so you head to the apartment’s tiny kitchen to heat up yesterday’s coffee because you forgot to get more on your way home from work.

 _You’re not used to picking up mundane things like_ coffee, _not when you spent the past four years buying weird combinations of objects like tapes and beef jerky and two beds for the night please oh and don’t forget cigarettes for Tim._

You’re only surprised for a minute when you discover that the kitchen is already occupied and the coffee is already brewing.

Tim doesn’t say anything, just acknowledges you with a subtle nod and gets out a second mug before pouring the coffee.

You sit shakily at the small table and try not to think about the way your heart was pounding when you woke or how you have the awful feeling that your dream was about a certain old college friend who once gave you several bags of old tapes and -

 _Please don’t think about that,_ you plead with yourself desperately _._ Thinking about that usually ends with panic and shivering and Tim having to hold your shoulders and tell you to _just breathe Jay_ and you’d really rather avoid all that today.

 _Today._ It _is_ technically morning, isn’t it?

You don’t remember the last time you woke after 5 in the morning. This should probably trouble you, but you’re so used to it by now that the realization just reminds you of how progressively fucked up your sleep schedule has gotten.

Tim sits down and slides one of the mugs over to you. You accept it gratefully.

“Dreams again?” Tim asks finally, breaking the taut silence.

You nod.

“Do you remember what of?”

_Kind of._

You shake your head. You’d really rather not think about it.

Tim shrugs.

“Do you?” you ask quietly.

“Brian.”

You don’t know what to say in response to that so you take another sip of your scalding hot coffee and you splutter as you burn your tongue.

Tim actually _snickers,_ the bastard.

You glower at him.

“What?”

Tim rapidly shakes his head and tries to hide his smile as he stares into his mug, but you can see it tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“I burned my tongue. Happenth to everyone.” You try to ignore that the burned, numb tip of your tongue has caused you to lisp in the least dignified way possible.

Tim quickly converts his bark of laughter into a cough.

You aren’t fooled.

“Thtop laughing!”

“I’m not!”

“Liar.”

Tim snorts into his mug.

“You’ve jutht gotten worth at lying, you know,” you grumble as you take another sip of coffee and _oh my god_ this stuff tastes terrible.

“You’re the one who forgot to get coffee,” Tim says innocently as you shoot your mug a nasty look.

“What, you couldn’t make tea?”

You both know that it takes an unhealthy amount of caffeine and nicotine to wake you and Tim up in the morning respectively. That’s just another one of those _things_ that you’re so used to that you accept it without question. And yet, it tingles unpleasantly in the back of your mind, the knowledge that these habits are merely mementos of years spent running and hiding and filming and lying.

Years you’d honestly rather you both just forgot.

_(Where’s seven months of memory loss when you really need it?)_

You both sit there in silence until the watery sunlight starts trickling tentatively over the horizon and your mugs of shitty yesterday’s coffee are cold and half-drunk.

Then the memory of Tim chuckling at you burning your tongue sneaks back into your head and you have to hide a smile.

“What’s so funny?”

Tim, of course, is sharp-eyed as ever.

“Nothing.” You shake your head because it’s so _stupid_ that this is what you’ve chosen to harvest amusement from. “Just, uh…” You smirk. “I burned my tongue.”

“Yeah?”

“And you _laughed.”_

Tim watches you with a confused half-smile. “And that’s funny?”

“I don’t know.” You shrug because you don’t have a justification for your positively bizarre sense of humor other than it’s 7 in the morning and you haven’t slept properly in fucking _years_ and you feel like absolute shit as you drink awful, day-old coffee but you’re sitting across the table from the one human being in the whole world who actually _understands_.

And for it’s worth, that actually feels pretty nice.


	64. patient; the hooded man and the masked man

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Hoody and Masky in a happy wingfuc.**
> 
> (note: i assumed this was a typo for "wingfic")

We follow Friend without reservation as they lead us past trees and more trees. We trust Friend. They have never led us wrong.

_(There was that one time with the rock but that was an accident. We’re very sure of this.)_

Friend occasionally fluffs their wings in annoyance because it’s been raining for the past several hours and even if the wooded canopy shields them from the worst of it, rivulets of rainwater still trickle down their feathers and cause their backs to itch.

We twitch our own raven-colored wings because it _is_ rather uncomfortable, but this isn’t our body so we pay it no mind.

Friend is not so lucky. Their body is _theirs,_ of course, and they do not have the luxury of slipping out of their head for a while to let their Other Self shoulder the discomfort. We’re not even sure they _have_ an Other Side like we do. We have never asked them.

_(We never speak to one another and the only Face we see is the one they present to us, black and red and stitched together. To us that is the truest Face we could ask for.)_

We have never told Friend how beautiful we find their wings, even as they are fluffed up and stiff and cramped. Their wings are owl’s wings, barn owl’s, every bit as sleek and silent and graceful as the body they are attached to. 

Our wings are black and loud and clumsy, and it suits us.

That is how it always goes. We hit and Friend points to what we should hit. Friend is the one with Thought and Cleverness. We are just a fragment in Someone Else’s skull. It is awful hard to think when we do not have our own head to think in, so we let Friend do that.

Friend stops and we stop just behind them, waiting. Patient. We have lots of Patience. Friend taught us that.

Friend holds up a gloved hand telling us to _“wait”_ so we wait.

Patient.

The rain is wet against our black wings _(only they are not ours, not really)_ so we fold them tighter against our back.

When Friend returns, they have our white Face in hand. They hand it to us and we accept it gratefully. We do not feel like Us without our Face.

Friend’s Face is a permanent frowning mask, but we feel that they would be smiling if they could.


	65. one mask for another; brian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Br1an 1s a bar tender.**

The alarm goes off, causing you to wince in pain because it feels like last night someone filled your head with concrete and the abrupt noise has sent the entire thing crumbling.

=

The telltale _ding_ of an incoming text sends another painful throb shuddering through your skull, but you manage to drag yourself out of bed and check your phone.

_Hope you’re still coming in after last night. -C_

You shut your eyes and groan, mashing your forehead onto the phone screen in an effort to recall last night’s evident lapse in judgment. You don’t remember much of what happened but your body apparently does, judging by the pounding headache.

_Something about Tim?_

Well. It’s no _wonder_ you must have tried to drink yourself into oblivion, if that’s who you were thinking about.

Shower, shave, choke down some aspirin, get dressed, drive to work. Follow the recognizable routine. You haven’t even had this job for a year, so let’s not fuck it up just yet, hm? Not when it’s the first shot at normalcy you’ve had since…well, since _all this._ Seven years, was it?

Yeah, okay. If a stroll down memory lane resulted in you attempting to drown your sorrows last night, maybe it’s best that you avoid that topic in future conversation.

Good plan.

You’re not entirely sure what karmic deity you appeased to score this job, especially considering how your resume is, well, less than stellar. There are still seven years of your life that have been unaccounted for, at least to the general public, and a good chunk of those were spent stealing food and prescription medication out of other peoples’ homes.

But, hey, at least no one could tell it was _you,_ right?

Good on you, Brian. Try to be optimistic.

All you did was exchange one mask for another, really. One frozen in an obstinate frown, the other a series of laughs and jokes and quips dealt out by Brian your friendly local bartender, who is _totally_ not psychologically traumatized from seven years of being stalked by a faceless eldritch horror.

_Focus, Brian._

Right. _Focus._ Focus on the positives. You have a job, you’ve got your shit somewhat together, and you haven’t had to pilfer medication from someone else’s house in three whole months.

That’s probably a record for you or something.

Today it’s harder than usual to maintain the façade of cheerful, easygoing Brian. Last night apparently trampled over some old memories, and they’re alive and kicking in the back of your head for the rest of the day.

You have a life that’s _normal_ for once, and it’s all you can do to keep from screaming in frustration because when did you ever do anything to deserve this?

But you don’t scream. You don’t even let your smile slip. You mix drinks and laugh at stupid drunk jokes and accept some pretty solid tips. You’re Brian, not some cryptic guy in a hoodie. You’re _normal._

Until Alex comes knocking again, anyway.


	66. artistic interpretation; crack

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Misky gets beat up the MH fandom.**

There Misky was, minding his own business when quite abruptly he found himself yanked into the Realm of Internet Message Boards and Tagged Posts, where a very angry fandom was in the middle of all-out war.

“Artists should be able to interpret characters with artistic freedom!” argued one tumblr user.

“Only if it doesn’t disrespect the original creator’s intent with the character!” retorted another.

Misky was very lost and had no idea what was happening so he stuck his hand up and waved “hello” at the legion of faceless Internet users.

They turned their attention to him.

“Hey, wait a minute,” declared one of the many tumblr users as they looked Misky up and down, evaluating his bright yellow jacket and pretty pretty limpid clear ice blue eyes. “Why are we fighting amongst ourselves? Isn’t it _this guy_ who’s been causing all the trouble?”

Across the board, there was a dawning of understandings and nodded heads. Everyone turned to glare at Misky and his perfect fluffy angst hair.

Misky had just enough time to register that everyone was _really pissed off_ before he was engulfed in a sea of angry _Marble Hornets_ fans.


	67. searching; jessica and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Tim and Jessica teaming up to save Jay.**

Your eyes fly open and you know immediately that it worked.

_You’re back._

_It_ took you, transported you back to its world as you’d hoped. You once told yourself you never wanted to come back here, but now -

_this is his only chance_

You wander the darkened forest, eyes straining against the inky shadows in search of movement, a bloody form crumpled against a tree trunk, anything. There is nothing.

You remember the terrible _off-_ ness of this place, the colors-that-just-don’t-seem- _right_ and the trees twisted in impossible contortions that make your head hurt. Everything in your head hurts and folds in on itself, and your mind is teaming with billions of thoughts but they all hover at the tip of your tongue, just out of reach.

It’s torture.

But this time is different. This time you have the pills to hold your fragmented brain together. You cling to your synthetic talisman, knowing how much your sanity _Jay’s sanity_ relies on it.

The last time you were here, you collapsed, sobbing and coughing and your head full of agony. It _taunted_ you, taking you from place to place and savoring your terror, your screams, your childlike fear.

You squint. There’s something moving -

“Who are you?”

It’s _her._ Demands of _how_ and _why_ tear at your poor battered head but you can’t make sense of them. You recognize her from the entries and the countless nights Jay’s spent staring at still frames of her, brow furrowed in guilt and frustration. She is torn and scratched and bleeding, eyes dark with suspicion, but _alive._

_Alive._

_Jay would be so happy._

It’s the nightmarish nature of this place that prevents you from immediately grasping her name.

“I know you,” you stammer, furious that this _thing_ can still cloud your mind, even while out of sight.

“I don’t - ” Her shoulders are hunched defensively as she backs away.

“Jessica!”

Pause.

“How do you know my name?”

“Jay!” You feel so _stupid,_ only able to relay one name at a time, but this hellish place has your thoughts all cluttered and stacked up together in horrid, inconsistent formations. “He-he’s looking for you. He…he _was.”_

“Jay?” And her expression lightens.

_She remembers him._

You nod eagerly. She _remembers._

“I know him…” Confusion gives her pause again, and your hatred for the _thing_ that stole your only friend intensifies.

“He looked for you. He never stopped looking.”

She stares at you, frowning ever so slightly.

“I never stopped looking for a way out. But I - ” She looks nervously over her shoulder. “I don’t know how long it’s been. It’s so…it’s always so _dark.”_

You don’t remember how long it’s been either. It could be _years._ Time isn’t a recognizable concept here, not like it is outside.

_Outside._

You don’t remember what the colors of outside look like anymore. How did that happen?

You shake the worrying thought aside.

_Jay._

“I’m looking for Jay,” you say. “I’m a friend. Tim.”

You still remember your name. Somehow you feel relieved, as though you were afraid you wouldn’t.

“Tim.” She meets your gaze again. “You’re looking for him too?”

You nod. She holds out a hand, scuffed and scraped and knuckles bleeding, and you take it.

You’ll find him together.

Because for all his anger and guilt and self-blame and frustration and _refusal_ to allow himself to grow close to others,

Jay is not alone.


	68. operation; jay and tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **what about jay having abdominal pain and Tim correctly diagnosing appendicitis and successfully operating on him. This is ref-ing their LP's, btw i'm not just on a fever high i promise**

Tim stares at Jay quizzically when he winces for the fiftieth time that day, clutching his side.

“You all right?”

“Mm,” Jay manages, hissing between his teeth. He massages his abdomen furiously. Carrying his not-very-heavy luggage up two flights of stairs to get into a hotel room shouldn’t be doing this to him. Jay knows their lifestyle, well…isn’t the healthiest one, but -

A fresh surge of pain causes him to double up and nearly keel over. Tim catches him.

“Woah, hey. You okay, buddy?”

He nods. His teeth clench to keep him from whimpering aloud in pain.

“Maybe you should lie down?”

Jay obliges, lowering himself gingerly onto one of the hotel beds.

“Where does it hurt?” Tim asks. Jay indicates his lower right abdomen and Tim nods, understanding.

Jay doesn’t like the look in his friend’s eyes.

“What?”

“You have appendicitis.”

_“What?”_

“I’ll have to operate on you.”

 _“No!_ Call 911, a hospital - “

"There’s no time.” Tim raises a pair of surgical scissors - _now hang on just where did he get those_ \- and grins wickedly. “Hope my hands are steady enough.”

Jay tries to scramble away but the pain only intensifies. He grabs at his side and stares, aghast, when his hand comes up bloody.

_Blood -_

Tim’s face is changing, growing paler, and his limbs are elongating and becoming frightfully thin as he reaches toward him - 

_he’s not in a hotel room at all is he_

Jay gasps, a wash of cold sweat jolting him back into reality -

_was this real_

_this couldn’t be_

_not when he still hadn’t found_ her _, or found Alex, or found his answers_

_there’s a bullet in him, sending throes of pain down his spine_

there’s a camera, he needs it

_Tim wanted to **operate**_

_operate_

He can’t _breathe_

the hotel room and the dilapidated walls of a building are blending together, viscous, blurry

Jay’s vision _tears -_


	69. a little beyond humanity; tim and HABIT

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **Prompt: Habit meets Tim ! But instead of being super aggressive towards him, he takes Tim under his wing**

_It’s been 12 days since Jay disappeared. Still no sign of him._

_No, that’s awful._ Tim erases the text in his head. He doesn’t know how to talk to these people, the thousands of faceless Internet users who won’t stop tweeting Jay’s account, asking if he’s all right. Tim almost feels like posting an entry comprised entirely of the lack of progress he’s made, because at least then he’ll feel like he’s getting something done.

But instead Tim wearily treks back to Benedict Hall, switches on the camera _Jay’s camera_ and begins combing the campus for the hundredth time in search of his friend.

There’s nothing else he can think of to do.

He was directionless before all this, even before…losing Jay _he’s not dead not yet_ and it’s not like Jay was ever his _compass_ or anything, but now, well.

Now Tim just feels even more lost.

“You know, I can help with that,” drawls a low voice. Tim jumps, spinning around to face the speaker.

He looks physically younger than Tim, but there’s something about him, perhaps in the way he stands, that gives Tim the impression that this is something a little beyond humanity.

Tim backs away for good measure.

“Come on,” snickers the man. He sheathes the rather large knife he’s playing with in his belt loop, adjusts his baseball cap, and grins. "Don’t be like that.“

“Like what?” Tim doesn’t stop inching away from the stranger, who only grins wider and spreads his arms wide.

Tim doesn’t like the look of that grin.

“I can help you.” He stalks closer, predatory.

“Help me with what?” Tim’s not about to play along with the stranger’s pleasant air, not when it’s so obviously false.

He doesn’t like this man, and he certainly doesn’t trust him.

“That _void,”_ he growls, jabbing a finger at Tim’s heart. “That _hole_ in your soul. You need something to _fill_ it, don’t you?”

Tim goes cold.

“I don’t need anything from you.”

“You sure about that?” The knife comes out again, and he lets it dance between his fingers in a way that’s far too casual to put Tim at any form of ease.

“Yeah.” Tim hasn’t stopped backing away. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

“Fair enough!” Another grin, and a flash of… _something_ in the stranger’s eye, and he saunters off, knife still flickering easily between his fingers.

Tim shivers. He feels like he just brushed up against something terrible, and is supremely puzzled and thankful that he somehow survived.


	70. interlude; alex, jay, tim

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the prompt: **set in[misplaced attachments](https://archiveofourown.org/series/70601) universe. jay attempts to smooth things out between alex and tim. how does it go WRONG**

He’s gotten tired of being the truce bridge between them. He’s gotten tired of Tim’s passive aggressive glares and how his dislike of Alex shows in every tiny movement. He’s gotten tired of Alex’s brow darkening every time the other man enters the room, tired of hearing Alex let out a steady stream of expletives aimed discreetly in Tim’s direction under his breath.

Jay is just so _tired._

And maybe that’s the issue.

Both men care for Jay, this much is obvious, but the point of the fact is that until they learn to get along like proper adults, the stress of conflict is just going to eat away at him more. It’s what Jay’s learned in his past dealings with Alex and Tim and Jessica, and it’s what’s making it so hard for Jay to get any _sleep._

(he hasn’t slept well for over four years. of course it’s more complicated than that)

(it’s easier to pretend that it isn’t. that there’s a ‘fix’ for everything _wrong_ with Jay, and in this case said 'fix’ is for the two most important people in his life - the two remaining people in his life - to actually _get along)_

(after all, Jay is _wrong_ , broken, empty, all the words they use in the story when the hero is beaten and down)

( _hero._ as _fucking_ if)

Jay just wanted to help. He wanted to make things better. _Really._ He just wanted them all to get _along._ And so he tells Tim, and Alex, and himself.

A mistake.

“Tim, wait! Please!” 

The other man doesn’t turn around. He slings his duffel furiously into the backseat of his car and is soon pulling out of the parking lot.

_pulling away, Jay’s last, desperate lead, and he’d_ left _him, left him in that tunnel and he was alone again, forever, Tim was_ gone -

_No no no no no we are_ past _that._

_There’s no tunnel. That’s gone. It’s away. You’re fine._

Jay tells himself over and over again, but he’s not fine, he’s shaking, and Alex is cursing back in the hotel room and there’s the sound of something shattering and Jay is pretty sure that the lamp is shot.

_Tim tells him to run, yells at him through the sputtering coughs and Jay knows he should have stayed but he doesn’t, he runs like the coward, the child he is -_

He shuts his eyes and wants nothing more than to crumple to the ground and sob like a child.

He just wanted to make things _better._ And now he’s losing his anchors, one by one, and he’s losing Tim and he knows Alex will be next. They’ll leave.  They always leave, for his _protection_ or for their own good, or whatever their reasoning is.

There’s no 'fix’ for people as broken and beyond help as they are.

Jay knows this. He always knew this. He wonders why he couldn’t just learn to _accept_ it.


End file.
